The Last Battle
by chezchuckles
Summary: Series Finale Fic. Takes place directly after the violent events in the Castle kitchen and spans the period of time directly after. Spoilers for all seasons of Castle. Multi-chapter.
1. Never Not

**The Last Battle**

* * *

 _"One of my favorite Sufi poems... says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen."_

 _― Elizabeth Gilbert_

* * *

 **I. Never Not**

 **x**

Rick Castle drags air in through his lungs.

Time has slowed down to this. Breath if it comes. The rattle in his lungs as the dark numbness spreads through his chest. The strange heat at his back.

Oh. He's lying in his own blood.

His fingers spasm around her hand. Cold, her hand is cold.

 _Her hand is cold._

He opens his eyes and finds hers on his own, an unwavering flame. Even as it dies.

Blood smears the floor, the baseboards, her fingers in his own. Blood cold and hot together. And with it the pain that cripples him.

But she's dying.

And he's not dying fast enough.

Her lips part, lashes not. Eyes closing.

"Kate." His voice is a garbled thing. He feels the biggest pieces stuck in his chest where the pain grates, abrading flesh and splintering bone. Movement is blade on blade, making gristle of his insides. "Kate."

She's dying. She won't open her eyes.

"No."

He won't.

"Kate." His shoulder is a fire with teeth, gnawing deep to his sternum the pain. But this is not _death_ , this is slow torture, and if she can withstand two bullets in the space of these past few years, he can _save her_.

He can.

This is not how his life ends. After hers, with hers. No. _No._

"Lucy," he calls. " _Lucy._ " Panic is curling in his slick guts, waking him up, scattering the numbness. "Lucy. Lucy _on_." What the fuck did she rename it, what was the name? "Linus!"

"How can I be of service to you, sir?"

He sucks in a ragged breath, nostrils flaring for oxygen, hearing it in his ears, pounding in his head. Staring at her. Kate. "Call - Twelfth Precinct. Dispatch. Call-"

"Dispatch is not a known-"

"Damn you. Twelfth," he grates out, desperation tightening his throat. Her face is chalk. He has to enunciate. "Call Twelfth Precinct."

"Connecting."

The ringing fills the apartment, ringing, the tone vibrating through the floorboards and into him until it feels as if his bones are shaking. Beckett. Her face is turned to him, fingers limp in his hand. The beauty mark on her cheek is too much.

He's pain everywhere but it's not alive; it's a weight, heavy, dragging. Sinking down through the floor.

Ringing.

He kicks a leg out and hooks at the base of the island, forces his body to roll-

 _God._

Sweat washes over him so fast he's dizzy lying on the floor. He's going to be sick. Everything's ringing.

"Who is this?"

Castle bites off the groan, forehead pressed to Kate's cold cheek. "Officer down," he croaks. His voice breaks on volume, tries again. "Off-officer down. Badge - badge 41319-"

"Captain Beckett!"

"Shot," he calls out. He's gonna pass out. Oh God. "Both - both of us. Shot. Fuck." He's fighting a losing battle. Blackness is swamping everything, falling down hard and fast.

"Mr Castle? Stay on the line, please. Mr Castle, we have officers and a bus enroute-"

Oh, good.

He might be dying after all.

 **x**

At first it's a girl.

Pixie. Alexis's round face, like his own, but his wife's color, shades of Kate. At first the girl, smiling and tipping her head to the side, facial expressions he knows from other places, other memories.

 _Strange. I thought it'd be a boy._

And then it is a boy.

Then it's two boys, cherubic, mischievous, twins.

 _Ridiculous._

Why did it have to be twins? Now he knows it's a dream, a vision portending the empty spaces. Ghosts. His mind playing tricks on him to keep him from panicking, to keep him from knowing the truth. The reality.

He slides deeper into the dreamworld.

Breakfast, summer sun through the windows, New York City's nonexistent birds calling, the three little ones circling, steadying, finding their places for an act that won't be played on any stage but this one.

And Kate.

His wife, beautiful, soft in a way she never is in real life. She has coffee, the steam curling, and her hair curves in the same winding loop as the vapor as she leans forward. His wife, this scene, the soft focus, warm edges, the girl tilting her head again, the boys devils and angels, the pearled gates swung open.

It's all a dream.

None of this is real.

 **x**

Seven, he says. _Seven._

Later, years, in the unchanging bits and jumble, _seven_ , he says and only then does he realize it's an answer.

 _How would you rate your pain today?_

It's after the darkness drops like a curtain that he finds the real question:

 _What is today?_

But it's too late. No one is here to listen.

He rates his pain. Off the scale.

He'd rather die in dreams.

 **x**

He wakes after all.

Washed through with weak light, a pale landscape of white.

His toe moves and agony rides with it. His mouth is dry when he cries out, and everything is broken.

He wakes after all.

"Hey, Rick, you need to stay still. Don't try to get up. They just took you off the vent."

He wakes after all.

A hand in his, fine-boned, strong. "It's alright, gonna be alright. You need to sleep."

He wakes after all.

His voice scratches out. Desperation. "Kate."

A hand touches his cheek and he realizes he's crying. It's not his wife. Who-

"Later, later, time for that later. You need to rest. Sleep."

"Beckett," he chokes-

He can't wake after all.

 **x**

Jim.

When it does coalesce and firm into something he can grasp with both hands, that's what he finds.

Jim Beckett. Sitting at his bedside.

"No," he groans. Jim is _here._ No.

Her father stands quickly and takes his hand, presses back on his left shoulder. "You'll hurt yourself."

"No," he chokes. "Oh, God-"

"It's my turn. They're with her, and it's my turn, and they'll have my hide if I let something happen to you on my watch."

"Oh, God," he gasps. "Kate."

Jim comes up short. Thunder first in his face, and then the clear wash after rain. "Oh, Rick. No. We're just taking turns. Swapping out. That's all _._ "

His body twists. "Kate-"

"Alive. She's alive. Thanks to you. Third surgery. Alive."

"Alive," he echoes. No signal reaches his brain. "Alive."

"At St Vincent's, the trauma center, ICU," Jim says. Like it's an explanation. Like it makes sense.

Castle crashes back to the bed.

Heaves breaths that burn.

"Kate's alive."

"She's working on it," Jim tells him. Words. Cohesion now, moments stringing together like cheap beads on a string, one to one to another, rough plastic.

It'll work.

"Kate," he breathes, closes his eyes. Listening. "I don't..."

"No one does," Jim gravels. "You're damn lucky. You both. Extensive blood loss, massive trauma, lucky."

Their breathing is the same, reality hitting, and Castle opens his eyes. "I'm okay now."

"Not quite, but you're on the mend."

"I want to see her."

"You can't." Jim sits down. Face closed.

There is no more conversation.

He drifts there, untethered.

But the pain in his body is not a dream.

 **x**


	2. Not Dreaming

**The Last Battle**

* * *

"We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that's like saying you can never change your fate."

―Amy Tan, The Hundred Secret Senses

* * *

 **II. Not Dreaming**

 **x**

"Darling, try a little."

"Can't." Kate Beckett offers her mother-in-law a weak smile, but no more words. Nothing will come; it's a Herculean effort to even say _no_. Nothing ever comes now, nothing comes at all. Martha gives up, withdraws the cup with its water and straw.

Alexis hovers. Smooths blankets until Kate flinches. She backs off again, brow plowed with furrows.

Kate used to like her. But Alexis has grown to be a nuisance, always nudging and prodding and pleading with those big blue eyes. Maybe it was cute when she was fifteen, maybe this is the consequence of encouraging the 'raising her parent' routine, but either way it's too much.

She can't.

Alexis lifts eyebrows and gives poignant and pointed looks to Martha, and they depart.

Finally.

Kate closes her eyes.

She just wants to sleep.

Perchance not to dream.

 **x**

The doctor crosses his arms over his chest, regards her.

Perhaps it's supposed to be intimidating, big bad doctor who knows it all, glaring down at his recalcitrant patient.

Kate is beyond caring. Beyond.

She should have died. She knows that. She's on her last life; she knows that too.

She wants to bat them all away like flies. No one here offers anything helpful; people crowd her space and her head, while her heart is utterly empty.

Lanie gives the doctor a tight smile, offers a regular comment filled with her usual snark, and she ushers the man to the door. Throws Kate looks over her shoulder that could either mean, _you owe me_ , or _you ought to try harder._

Trying is overrated. She's been knocked entirely flat, all the air punched out of her, and trying involves muscles she doesn't have access to any longer. Like her heart.

This is not her.

But if not, who else could she be?

 **x**

Once, there was the dream of a baby. Babies.

Well, a dream is like that - hazy, indistinct. A put-off concept that could happen 'later' when she has her shit together and the timing is right.

Then, she was shot.

In the stomach. Should have been fatal. The gods demanded a sacrifice, life for a life, blood for blood.

She bled, but-

The baby took the brunt of things.

No, sorry, the _dream_ of babies took the brunt of things.

Kate should have died.

It would have been easier. Follow him.

Instead, dreams are dying in her place.

All their lovely dreams, how beautiful it would have been with him.

 **x**

The IV is changed. Alexis is a pale ghost with a flaming sword. The nurse taps her elbow as if to check something. Kate turns her head to look. The nurse has disappeared as if she was never there.

Kate has done this before; she has been the gunshot victim, orienting to nothing, her days circling the drain. She knows what this is, and how false her reality, but she can't help linking the disparate pieces together, as if one day is one day.

But one day is an hour, one day is a thousand years.

She knows from past experience that she will look back on these days (hours? moments?) and be unable to connect the dots. Pain medication overlaying pain creates a jarring narrative, and she is the unreliable narrator.

She _knows_ this.

And yet her brain continues to spin a timeline, laying out tick marks for every incident that occurs as if it is at all sequential or orderly. Alexis sitting on the bed. Martha complaining about the talk show host. The nurse erasing the white board and writing in her name _Lucy_.

It's not. Lucy is the home AI her husband bought. Alexis isn't really here. Martha always turns off the television and tries to hold a conversation; it is her father who watches it with her, volume turned up, not talking.

She can't begin to measure her time here. She keeps telling herself that the words that are said have no actual connection to each other, that the morphine slides one thing into another, that the world is melting.

The world is melting.

 **x**

There is never any sleep. No one will leave her alone. If Martha is retiring for the night, it's Alexis interposing in the doorway, haunting the room like an extra from a Hitchcock film. Her hair is violently abnormal, her skin bleached, her clothing too grown-up for that fifteen year old girl who organized the lost and unclaimed.

Never alone. Nurses are always in and out, checking, blood pressure and pulse-ox and pupil dilation. A light shines in her eyes or the gurney is being rolled out under the hall's fluorescents and only then does Kate see the surgeon behind his mask, the IV in her arm.

The light in her eyes, the well-meaning crowd. Light comes in from the hall, a lamp on low behind her, artificial and harsh. She knocks their hands away, unwilling to be prodded at again, poked, and something washes hot and terrible across her body.

She panics and jerks inward; hands hold her down.

"No, no, honey, it's okay. It's my fault for startling you. I dropped the cath bag."

Catheter bag. _It's my fault,_ she hears, it's my fault, she thinks.

My fault.

"These two are just in here to help me shift you onto clean sheets."

Clean sheets.

"No," she croaks, but she's paralyzed with the last of nightmares.

There are three of them, nurses again, the stocky one with the harelip that turns out to be a mustache, turns out to be a man. "No? You don't want to be on these sheets all night."

"No, you didn't drop the bag," Kate gets out, pressing words against her teeth. "I kicked you." She heaves a breath. "I'm sorry. I didn't-"

"It's okay, honey. Happens that some get like that after surgery, anesthesia takes you."

"Surgery," she echoes. "Think - bad dream?" She doesn't remember ever sleeping. But kicking out, instinct and reflex, the pain startling through her, she remembers that now, pieces. Her guts ache.

"There, there," the man says, fumbling to pat her shoulder. His gentle wide hands as he shifts her.

She grunts, but she can do nothing to relieve it. He adjusts her, and she tries not to smack his hands away, tries so very hard not to lash out, but she does anyway. "Sorry, sorry."

"We heard about your husband, what happened to you guys - and in your own home," the quiet one says. "You don't have to apologize. We're nurses in the trauma center, we understand."

"My husband," she cracks open. _Sorry, sorry_. She loves him; she never meant for this to find them, in their own home.

She's crazy about him.

And without the _him_ , she's just - crazy.

Unraveling.

 **x**

There are reassurances. A television is always on. Detectives and police officers from the Twelfth file by like mourners avoiding the open casket.

The remote control is velcroed to the hospital bed's railing. A lift of her arm and a reach with her fingers - but then she would have to pull. Tug. She would have to put some force and energy behind her movement to actually take up the remote and point it towards the tv mounted from the ceiling, and she does not have either of those things.

A lot of political bullshit. People talking. Comb-overs and old hags. Gums flapping. She is reminded, vividly, of who isn't running for President this election year, Bracken is _dead,_ and how that one small tear in the fabric scattered a rat's nest - rats' nest - of terror and deception and death.

He always squeals when they find a rat. Even when they're standing on the platform waiting for the 1, and he catches the beady eyes in a sudden iPhone photo flash as a tourist throws a peace sign and presses cheek to cheek-

He squeals, and she rolls her eyes.

But no eye-rolling now. Movement is photo-flashes of agony against the retinas of her inscape, her very _body_ is a monument and edifice to pain, and they tell her to keep her movements limited or they will restrain her again.

She isn't trying to be good. She isn't trying anything.

They are fooled into thinking she is good.

She got her husband shot.

He could be dead.

 _he must be dead_

Why else would Martha and Alexis persist on attending her? Perpetuating a lie to keep her spirits up. They arrive like clockwork and sit and hem and haw and offer her water and smiles and reading aloud from other people's books and she lies there.

She does not stare at the wall because staring would require focus.

She leaves. Absents herself from the room of her body and its contingent pain.

Maybe this is dying.

Martha, brittle energy and muted flare. Alexis, acidic anxiety burning like her hair. Her father, silent with grief no one will name.

Kate closes her eyes.

Finally there's darkness.

 **x**


	3. Woman in My Dream

**The Last Battle**

* * *

"Who are you  
long legged  
woman in my dream  
kissing me open mouthed"

―Michael Ryan, My Bright Aluminum Tumblers

* * *

 **III. Woman in My Dream**

 **x**

Esposito sits forward with his elbows on his knees, gravely inspecting Castle. "Better than I thought."

Castle is having a hard time caring. What is this? Guilt, subservience, due diligence - all phrases that have lost their meaning. He's imprisoned. His body is a cage, and these well-meaning visitors are his jailers.

If only he could _get_ to her.

Esposito thumbs the television volume up with the remote, chucks it on the bed, leans back in the chair as if to settle in. Another warden.

"Lighten up, Castle Could've been worse."

"You trying lightening up when you've been shot and no one will tell you anything."

"Ouch," Espo chuckles. But the laughter rings just as false as everything else. He's not his old self. None of them are. "Don't have to be mean."

It is difficult to be kind when nothing goes his way. When no one will speak to him.

"I need the story," Castle comes up with. The words are rough in his throat. "Espo. I need to know what happened."

Espo doesn't look at him, his hands shoved in the pockets of his dress pants, his tie askew. Castle can't recall why Espo would need dress clothes, and he can't find it in him to care either.

"There was only one ambulance, man."

That catches his attention.

Esposito unstuffs a hand and rubs the back of his neck. "Don't know what happened, who they thought was calling. Exchange gave a weird-ass number-"

"The house computer," he says quickly, trying to push them past that. He _knows_ that part. "AI. Like those Amazon commercials you hate."

"Aw, yeah. With Baldwin and-"

"Yes, yes, shit," he says, gritting his teeth as his interest makes the pain grind in his shoulder. Shit, this hurts. He never curses, and he's cursing now. Cursing out loud.

"Well, that thing messed up the dispatch computer. It was put out as an officer down but you were the name listed. Ryan and I came from the bar, Lanie had already gone home. But when we got there, the paramedics were taking you."

"What," he rasps. His throat is raw and Esposito shifts forward, reaching for the cup as if about to offer ice chips. Castle knocks his hand away. "Not me. Kate."

"I know that." A glare that somehow feels like a staredown.

And then it comes out that Esposito is feeling responsible, guilty, and that's why the visits, the constant bro-ing. The mindless tv watching while Castle fumes.

Espo made the decision to triage him on the floor of his own kitchen, their lives diffusing across the wood while Espo tried to get the bleeding under control. It was Esposito's choice, his call. He sent Kate on ahead in the ambulance, Ryan following.

Mostly drunk, and working with Army field medic knowledge he hadn't used in over a decade, Esposito packed his wound and waited with him until the second bus arrived, seven minutes later.

Kate, seven minutes ahead of him, was already being carried off to the trauma center while his own ambulance took a sedate pace to the hospital five blocks over. Not the trauma center, because by that time Esposito had gotten it under control. Ordinary emergency department took him in.

He doesn't remember the wait, but apparently there was a wait. The two of them in a curtained off section, listening to other people dying.

"You kept asking for her," Espo tells him, rubbing a hand down his face. Gruffly, the man shakes his head and sets his jaw. "I tried to get Ryan, but he wasn't answering. So neither of us knew shit. It was-"

Esposito doesn't tell him what it was.

Castle can guess.

It might be a lot like _now_ , when he knows but doesn't know, when he can guess but can't be certain.

She's there, he's here, and his own broken body is keeping him from her.

"Don't visit me again," he gets out, glaring at Esposito. The man bristles, straightening in the chair as if to rise. Castle makes a fist in the bedsheet, impotent, immobile, furious. "Don't you dare visit me until you've gone to see her. Until you have _news._ Until she doesn't need you."

Esposito's eyes drop, a head nod that says everything and nothing.

After a time, they both settle. The television laugh track fills the room like marbles in a tin can, jarring.

It's Espo's fault his wife is miles away from him right now, and Espo's fault she's alive.

Seven minutes. Seven minutes ahead of him into death, ahead of him into life.

"She was shot twice," Esposito says then. "That's what I know. She was shot twice, and you only once, and that was the choice I made."

 **x**

Alexis and his mother are the ones he tries the most for. Plastered on smile. Gentler tone. Best he can manage in this condition.

"You're chomping at the bit, Richard, but you need rest."

"Yes, Mother." The skin around his eyes is tight with bracing himself. "How was she?"

"She's not as far along as you. Need to give her time."

"That tells me very little, Mother." He tries to make it sound amusing. Amused. One of those is what he's shooting for, but he has trouble _caring_ about his mother's feelings right now. "How is she, Alexis?"

His daughter leans in against the railing, her arms on top of it, smiling at him. "She's doing really well. Still on IV, of course, pain meds and all kinds of things. The morphine was making her throw up, but-"

"The morphine made her throw up?" This is a thing he doesn't know about her. He doesn't _know_ the Kate Beckett recovering from a bullet wound and while that should be reassuring - who wants to know what his wife is like post-gunshot? - it is instead humiliating and frustrating.

Because he _would_ have known, had she ever called him that summer.

"It was in her chart, bad reaction to morphine, but apparently no one was paying attention," Martha huffs, hands fluttering around the foot of the bed, straightening his blanket. "Honestly. Those people call themselves a trauma center."

"Gram," Alexis chides, lifting up and dropping her arms from the railing. She shakes her head and turns back to him. "It wasn't that bad. She's making it sound like they're incompetent. They're the rated the top trauma center in all of the Northeast."

His daughter's evident research is mollifying. He knows Alexis shows her concern by over-planning, doing computer searches, reading up on her subject. He can appreciate that. "But she had a reaction to the morphine. Now what? She has pain medication, right? Because I don't know that I'd be talking right now if I didn't have the morphine."

"Yours has been dialed down, Dad."

"It has?"

"They've already started weaning you off. They're using a codeine-based opiate instead. I can't remember. Lanie was-"

"Lanie should be at Kate's - with Kate. Not here. I have you all, Kate has been shot twice and has-"

"Kate has us too, Dad."

"Go, then," he urges, too tired for the frustration to stay under wraps any longer. "Go back to Kate's. Pumpkin. Please. I'm asking you-"

"Dad."

"Don't make a wounded man beg."

" _Dad_."

"I'm going to be sleeping in seconds anyway. Talking wears me out."

"But Detective Esposito was here for four hours," she protests.

"He doesn't talk," Castle answers. His vision has been shot through with dark spots since his mother tried to reenact 'the scene' between Josh and Jim Beckett that _also_ occurred without him, and if he hears one more non-important thing about all the histrionics _surrounding_ Kate without actually hearing _about Kate_ , he will strangle someone. "Go. Mother, make her go. Take her with you. Both of you. Kate needs people or she forgets."

Forgets to _live._

"Dad, you need people too."

"I need _sleep_ ," he stresses. He needs - he doesn't know what he needs. He needs not this, but his daughter and mother's presences can't ameliorate that one way or another.

He won't tell them that. He thinks he did actually tell them that yesterday when they arrived. Words keep falling out when he's doped up.

"Okay, Dad. Fine." A kiss, dry and light, against his forehead. His daughter's hair makes him see red and he wishes she would dye it back to the strawberry-blonde it was when she was a girl, little, trusting him. "Hayley will come check on you-"

"Hayley needs to be at the office," he mumbles. His eyes have fallen shut. "She's security."

"She's making sure that's the last of LockSat. She's doing her job," Alexis whispers. "Sleep, Dad. I promise I'll check on Kate right after I leave you."

"Leave me now," he sighs. "Kate now."

He misses when they finally go, knows only the heavy weight on his chest and the bitter realization that he's nowhere near getting out of here.

He's desperate to get out of here.

 **x**

This is agonizing. Why did he ever say they were two independent alpha personalities in their relationship? He's not alpha anything. He's beta. He's whatever comes after beta. No, he's the omega, the last one to know.

They can't even _call_ each other. The hospital policy in the trauma center's ICU forbids personal cell phones, and the damn bedside phones - as he has discovered - are only for in-house use. He tried calling, but it clicked him over to the first four digits he dialed: 555-0. The hospital administrator at extension 5550 is fed up with him.

He doesn't even have a phone. Beckett tossed theirs after that ambush and they never had a chance to get new ones. Burners, yes, but he has no idea where those went.

His planning is usually right on top of things, but he can't hold on to his moments, to the threads of he's trying to weave, and forget it.

Forget planning.

He just needs to go.

He needs to go.

No one will help him, no one will get him what he needs, what he wants to hear, then he will do this himself.

It's been _weeks_. She's had four surgeries to repair bleeding in her chest cavity, a perforation in her diaphragm, and the upper portion of her stomach. She's had four surgeries and he's not even there to know.

Unacceptable.

No more planning. He's going. Right now.

Castle adjusts the sling only as a stall for courage, and then he braces himself. Shifts.

 _Shit._

Okay, okay, a second here at the edge of the mattress won't hurt. Just a second. Wait for that to die down in there. He has a sling on, should have kept everything immobile.

It feels like knives are grinding into his shoulder joint.

(And he was only shot once.)

Castle leans against his good shoulder and carefully manipulates his legs over the side of the bed, slowly points his toes towards the floor.

He's shaking.

Ridiculous. All he's done is lie in bed for - how long has it been now? Nine days. Maybe eleven. He's lost count of how long he was under for the repair surgery to his shoulder. Was that yesterday?

No, couldn't be. Two days ago then. Three?

Too long.

His feet touch the floor. He eases forward and puts weight on his feet.

For a moment, everything is completely fine. For a moment, this seems so easy he's angry with himself for not trying it before now.

And then his knees buckle right out from under him and he crashes to the floor, managing, of course, to smash the wounded shoulder against the bed as his elbow catches on the railing.

The pain is an IED through his upper body, shrapnel ripping him apart, secondary frags exploding in his chest, white behind his eyes.

He blacks out.

 **x**

He stops listening.

They only say the same things. _Never do that again_. The gist of it is, he's a fool and worse, and he could have seriously damaged his shoulder beyond a surgeon's repair.

His mother is making empty promises about talking to Katherine, being their adorable go-between, passing messages. Alexis pulls out the guilt card, limpid blue eyes and downturned mouth, pleading with him to be good.

He may be in traction, captive witness, but he doesn't have to listen.

 _We'll figure something out, Dad._

He doesn't hear a thing he likes until the consult with the surgeon. Younger man, hotshot, but he's rattling on about removing bone fragments from his pectoralis major and coracobrachialis, how the muscle groups work in concert to move his arm toward the front of his body to reach for an object, but Castle catches only one important phrase.

 _Well, you were supposed to be discharged Thursday into a rehab center._

None of it matters after that. He's wearing a cast from his elbow to his neck, he's graduated from a sling to a heavy-duty robo-cop brace, and he managed to re-injure his knee so that's in a brace as well.

And he would have been discharged Thursday. To rehab.

Of course.

The surgeon explains that his humerus wrenched out of socket when he fell, driving the bone straight up into his clavicle and breaking the overlay of pins and screws that had been holding the joint together.

He got shot. Everything is fragile. And yet Castle tried to catch himself when he fell with both hands, doing even more damage to what was already damaged.

Now there's no telling when he'll get out of here.

 **x**

Hayley has disobeyed his direct order and has come to perch at the edge of his mattress with a laptop.

"What do I owe the pleasure?" he grits out. His eyes are grimy this morning; he feels dehydrated. But if one more person tries to feed him ice chips, he's going to strangle her. Or him. He's boiling with an equal opportunity frustration.

"I've done something," she says, mouth twitching at him as she surveys the damage. "Since you're so clearly going to finish the job."

"Finish what job."

"The bullet," she states bluntly. "My gallows humor is lost on you right now, I see, so let's skip it and go straight to the good part."

"Please do." He aches with every breath. But they keep saying _oh he must have been delirious, trying to get out of bed, oh he must not have known what he was doing._

He knew exactly what he was doing.

Hayley opens the laptop and turns it to face him. She taps a key and he dutifully turns his attention to the small screen.

"Did you find some new thread we missed? Because I'm tired of LockSat, I have-"

All the words fall right out of him.

Video is running on the laptop, blown up full screen so he can see every detail. The white wall, the delineation of a hospital railing with its attached IV lines and pumps and machines.

And Kate.

She's asleep, her chin angled to one side so that all he can see is the smudged shadow at her cheekbone. The chalk of her skin.

"Oh, God."

Hayley glances up at him, then leans in over the laptop, adjusts the angle. "Alexis. She's going to swing around in exactly twenty seconds so you can see your wife's face."

Sure enough, the image jostles, pans down as his daughter lifts to her feet; she must have been sitting in a chair beside Kate's bed. The laptop - it has to be a laptop, right? no cell phones allowed on the ICU floor - changes position jerkily, and the image isn't very clear, lots of artifacts as the refresh rate goes down.

But when Alexis gets to the other side of the bed, Castle can see his wife.

He dashes the back of his free hand against his cheeks, won't look at Hayley. Only Kate, only his wife, soaking up the severe lines of her face. All planes and angles, eye sockets, cheekbones, lips almost grey, dark shadows.

She's asleep. Sleeping. Or pain medication. "Four surgeries?" he husks.

"Four," Hayley affirms quietly.

"Why can't I hear anything?"

"It's video only. No audio." Hayley shakes her head. "We slipped a low-frequency camera into your daughter's laptop. The nursing staff makes her turn off the airport card, but the camera comes with its own hotspot."

"Will it hurt - Kate?" He swallows roughly and rubs his chin into the top of his uninjured shoulder, drying his tears on the scratchy gown. "The machines, I mean."

"It's so low frequency..."

"Will it interfere with the machines," he repeats. "Because-"

"After a little while, it's possible it might cause some feedback."

"Then stop," he croaks. "Stop. Tell Alexis to leave. Can she hear us?"

"She can't hear us. No audio-"

"Call her, then. Message her."

Hayley's shoulders slump, but she turns the laptop back around, opens a chat window that he can see from his bed.

"Tell Alexis, shut it down," he says, voice growing stronger. "Right now. Shut-"

The screen goes black.

He breathes again.

"Why did you do that," he says, heart thundering so hard his arm is throbbing.

"You can't get out of bed, Rick. You can't check out AMA, and then somehow avoid the reporters hanging around outside, and hop in a cab to get to her bedside. You cannot."

His jaw works, eyes filling once more.

Damn pain medication. Worse than truth serum.

"You need to heal. Be smart about this. You have a long road ahead, and hers is even longer."

"I _know_ that." He jerks forward, groans as gravity hits him like a sledge hammer. He flops back to the bed, pain pulsing through his arm. "What do you think I've been saying for a week? I have a broken shoulder. She's been through _four_ surgeries to repair the internal damage from being shot _twice_. She-"

"Either you trust us to take care of her, or you don't. But if you keep on like this, sullen and ungrateful, you'll alienate your family. Which is also _hers_."

Hayley leaves before he can even formulate a response.

 **x**


	4. The Call of a Name

**The Last Battle**

* * *

 _"I remembered the dream_  
 _and heard him call my name."_

 _-Jeffrey Harrison, 'Last Advice'_

* * *

 **IV. The Call of a Name**

 **x**

There are nightmares.

A hole blown open in her torso. She uses the ragged flaps of skin to hold herself together, hold in the things that should be on the inside: her guts and glory, her heart pulsing weakly to a beat it can't find any longer.

She travels streets made crooked by grief. She clutches her skin like an overcoat, afraid it will be stolen, her nightmare sliding into a Gogol short story, the winter settling on her shoulders and dragging her further down into darkness.

She nightmares the sound of his body hitting the floor. The sound of his body collapsing. The sound of his body, over and over, stuck in the dream.

She rounds the corner without her weapon. She rounds the corner already firing. She is always too late. She is forever too late.

She has nightmares of his daughter, the same kind of adult that Kate herself used to be - that is, not an adult at all, but a little girl orphaned at heart, blown open and overturned and upended and ruined.

Black holes in the sky, black holes in her eyes. Eight weeks of him missing, that one summer of darkness masquerading as light, and the hope was conviction rather than a feeling. The hope was stubbornness and denial.

Now she is too broken for hope. Too weak to force it. She wants him to be alive; this isn't her giving up. It's just not likely.

The world does not give to her as it gives to others.

It takes away.

This is one more night her body persists in living, while her heart flops around on the outside, her eyes closed and her world overweighted and the sum of all things a calculation too great.

There is no living with death.

 **x**

Whole days are blown out of the water.

Physical therapy is a thing with spikes that comes for her when it pleases, waking her when she's not even aware of being asleep. The manipulation of her legs, pushing her knees back to her chest, is both critical and unthreading, taking her out for longer than she cares to fathom.

Dipping her into nightmares, bobbing back to the surface for air, sinking again.

Her days begin to string together now, misshapen beads made by an angry preschooler in a vague attempt to follow a teacher's instructions. They sit in her throat like lumps, and she swallows at them, the glue-paste of her consciousness, begins to make sense of things.

They tell her she's dreaming, they tell her she's confused, they tell her it's the pain medication.

They tell her _no, darling, no dear, he's in another hospital, he's had surgery, you've had more, you'll be fine, you'll both be fine._ She just can't pinpoint who says it or when, or if it's even real. She is the unreliable narrator and her life isn't roses and how can she believe any of this?

Her father, one late afternoon when the sun is a stripe across her knees and the bed has had to be raised again so she won't tear her abdominal muscles where they've been reattached at their insertion points, her father brings a soft bag to her side and loosens the drawstring.

Her wedding band tumbles out from the dusky grey bag and into her father's palm. He lifts it by a thumb and forefinger, holds it up.

She watches with her eyes, her hand twitching as it does sometimes now, nerve endings firing where she hasn't asked for them to.

"Your fingers are still too swollen," Jim says, his voice like sandpaper in the golden light. "But I think you need it. And Alexis found this." He hooks a finger into the gray jewelry bag and pulls out her necklace, the long chain on which she used to wear her murdered mother's ring.

Kate lets out a hard breath, the burn in her eyes from tears that won't spill.

"I'll slip it on here, and you can wear it like this. Help remind you of what's really true, Kate."

What _is_ really true? She can't keep it; the truth of her reality slides through her fingers like water.

"Keep this until you see him again, Katie." He crowns her with the necklace, slides it over her head, arranges the simple wedding band just at her sternum. "Hold on to this, since you're having trouble holding on to anything else."

She brings a hand up, so carefully, doesn't want to wake the pain that lives there, and she curls her fingers around it. The gold is warm, probably from being in her father's pocket, and she struggles to keep it.

"I feel bad," she whispers.

"I know, sweetheart." His hand pets her hair back from her forehead. "Just sleep. Let yourself rest. You need it. Surgery has been rough on you."

Death has been rough on her. She doesn't want to do this any longer.

She doesn't want to carry Rick like she carried her mother, the albatross around her neck.

 **x**

"You look better than you did last time I was here." A man in a suit, his tie tacked on by a silver bar with - impossibly - a Star Trek insignia. "Captain Beckett, how are you feeling?"

Official visit? "Been better," she croaks out. And falls silent again. He looks faintly like that Star Trek Voyager guy; she can't remember his name, the one with the face tattoo and the rebel in him. Maybe she's hallucinating.

But no. Behind him are both Esposito and Ryan, Espo in a suit that makes him look hulked out and Ryan scratching the back of his neck and shifting on his feet.

The suited man clasps his hands behind his back and observes her, and she lets him because she can do no else. He seems to be waiting her out, but she's played this game before - she invented this game in the box.

Her father used to say when she was a kid, _better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt._ And her mother would laugh and add that she could ask for a lawyer and _then_ shut up.

Kate still follows that maxim. Helps that it takes supreme effort to keep herself cognizant of whatever conversation is flowing around her, helps also that she has a natural reserve.

Castle would blurt things out.

She misses him. It aches.

"Do you remember who I am this time?"

This time?

He extends his hand as if to shake. "Agent Greene, Graham Greene, from the AG's office."

"Like the author?" Sounds fake. She can't lift her arms from the bed, though her fingers twitch and her hand rotates.

Greene clasps her hand in both of his, as if that's okay. "Yes, exactly like that. As I told you last time I was here, my parents are recklessly literate."

 _We won't do that_ , she thinks hazily. _Characters instead of authors. No one will judge them for their parents' loves._

"What's going on?" she says finally, putting that way. No dreams for now.

"Your acting captain has allowed me to shadow the Caleb Brown case," Greene says with a thin-lipped smile. He looks like an old man. Dark hair and a ragged face. Five o'clock shadow. Brown eyes. A child's dream of a scary adult. "I'm liaison for the AG's office. Do you remember me?"

Does she?

"Captain Beckett, I need to pick your brain about everything that's happened. You've been the one thread going through this whole case."

"My case," she murmurs, licks her lips to speak. "Been my case. Should be over."

"It can't be over. There are too many loose ends. But that's my job, ma'am, not yours."

She hates _ma'am._

"I want to go back to the beginning, Captain. Can you tell me how it's even remotely possible for a mid-earning defense attorney to stumble upon one of the biggest spy rings in the history of our country?"

"What?" she scrapes out. "I don't-"

"Johanna Beckett managed to stumble blind into quite a mess."

The breath leaves her in a rush, dizziness making her feel like she's sliding off the bed. "I don't - that doesn't make sense. What are you talking about?"

"You just happened to tug the threads of a major counter-intelligence operation with your actions. You do know that, don't you? My team has run into stonewall after stonewall in regards to this case."

Is he talking about _her_ or her mother? Did he say Johanna Beckett or is she that muddled by the drugs? She can't follow his questions, can't remember why he's here in the first place, can't connect one from the other. His name is Graham Greene. That's all she can recall.

So she doesn't answer, instead shifts her eyes to Ryan and Esposito. Begging for help. A clue.

And then it clicks. The boys never here to explain, never getting an explanation from anyone. Espo in a tie that chokes him. Ryan faintly unhappy but hiding it. "Captain Esposito?" she says, voice sticking as she tries to smile.

He winces and rubs the back of his neck, but he steps up to the bed and shrugs at her. "Hands are tied on this one, boss. Answer his questions."

Warmth diffuses in her chest at that _boss_ , as if she's been left out in the cold and they took her back in where she belongs. "AG's office, can trust them?" They're the ones who were smashed to bits in this LockSat mess. Weren't they? "Vikram?"

"He's working with us now," Greene says quickly, jumping into their conversation. "Let's forget Bracken for now and move on to the night you were shot."

Something must crawl across her face just as it does her heart because Ryan crowds closer than the others, lays a hand on her shoulder. "One PP has re-opened the Caleb Brown case, the guy in the trunk? It-"

"Obviously wasn't Caleb Brown," she answers, her voice thick with disuse. She tries to clear it, but that takes muscles that live in her torso, diaphragm and lungs, which feel bound up by spiders' webs rather than stitches. Pain is a glass blade through her stomach and she closes her eyes.

She has the sudden thought that she's closed her eyes a lot during this interrogation. How much of it has she slept through?

"No, it's not Caleb Brown, but the DNA database is claiming the man you shot in your apartment isn't Caleb Brown either."

Her eyes flare open. Agent Greene is studying her minutely, gauging her for alertness or truthfulness, she can't tell. "It was, it is. That was Caleb Brown. Ask - anyone in the justice system. His clients. A visual ID says it's Caleb Brown who shot us."

"We told him," Ryan chimes in. Esposito has been uncharacteristically silent, she thinks, though she's a little too out of it to play politics well enough right now, and she'll assign his silence to that.

Or to her own muddled consciousness. She might be in and out; there are dark gaps in her memory and understanding of this conversation. Her mother never stumbled onto a spy ring, that was Beckett herself. Her mother found dirty cops and those cops panicked... and hired a CIA black ops assassin?

 _Bracken_ had access to a guy like Coonan, way back then, before he was anything more than a city player?

Did her mother actually stumble onto clandestine affairs? Was Montgomery-

No. No, she's _not_ doing this. She's done; it's over. They've paid too high a price for this to keep going on.

"Guy in the trunk?" she asks, swallowing hard and trying to get back in the game. This could matter, be important for later. She shot _someone_. Caleb Brown might not even exist. "We figure out - who he was? Guy in the trunk. I'm not - sure I follow."

"Not yet," Esposito says, a short shake of his head and burning eyes on her. Not the real crux of this discussion, she realizes belatedly.

Caleb Brown not Caleb Brown in the loft. "Oh. DNA has been switched?" She winces as she tries to sit up straighter, hisses through pain that bubbles up through the drugs. No morphine; she's always nauseated by morphine. Did they give her-

"DNA was changed on a federal level, Captain Beckett. Does that suggest anything to you?" Agent Greene is leveling her with a look.

She's already leveled. She's broken bodied on a bed with her hips velcroed down to keep her from undoing what's been done to hold her together. "Federal level, federal access."

"CIA," Greene says grimly.

"NSA," she counters. "FBI. Any of them." CIA is Castle's father's work and she still doesn't know if Rita is alive, if his _father_ is alive, and she can't expose that connection no matter what.

"Don't play dumb. It's not attractive."

"Lay off," Ryan snarls, channeling Esposito who has to remain silent in this. Acting Captain. She's glad for that, means it will go right no matter what Agent Greene says.

She keeps her mouth shut. Closes her eyes. She's been shot twice. She had a hole on the right side of her chest and another just below her sternum and she can play possum for as long as it's necessary.

"I want only to get to the bottom of this, to be _certain_ there are no others waiting in the wings. I know she wants the same. Don't you, Captain Beckett? Your husband is lying in a hospital bed miles from here, unprotected, while you're in a reasonably secure trauma center in the middle of your precinct's own territory-"

"Castle," she rasps, eyes flying open. She snags Ryan's sleeve, fists the material, her heart thundering. "Castle-"

"We have him," Ryan says fiercely. "Don't think we don't have him. Protected on _all_ sides, boss."

Her heart tastes funny. "Hayley?"

"Who is Hayley?" Greene interrupts, pushing in closer, bypassing Esposito who is blocking him out. "Who is Hayley? I need to know-"

"Hayley?" she murmurs, confusion clouding her senses. Did she say that? Hayley is smart, CIA; she'll have Castle protected, and Alexis and Martha-

"Obviously she's on pain meds, man. You gotta dial it down." Esposito has Greene blocked out now, just her two boys at the bedside and shaking their heads. "Half the things she says are muddled. You heard her when you mentioned her husband. She can't track us right now. Give her a week or two, when things start making sense again."

"She's been shot before. By the same-"

"Part of the same," Esposito answers. "Look, leave her for now. She'll answer questions when she can receive visitors. Let me take you back to the Twelfth and we'll go through the whole case again, from the beginning."

Their voices trail off, fading if not in reality then from Kate's ability to stay.

Her chest is in a vise, cramped with pain, making it hard to breathe. She feels a hand on her shoulder and realizes Ryan is still there.

His voice comes close. "It's the security team you hired when this all went down. Hayley has point. I promise you Castle is being protected."

 _Rick._

 **x**

She wakes.

To a dream.

Calling her name.

"Rick," she cries.

The dream takes form, shifts closer and into her, lips against her forehead.

"Castle," she gasps, and the tears are real, blurring everything.

His face is gaunt at his eyes and cheekbones, swollen puffy at his jaw. Haggard, but alive, and his fingers pet the hair lying limp against her neck. "Kate. Hi."

" _Hi_?" she mewls, question and grief and relief in one. She tries reaching for him but she's caught, tangled in IV lines and heaviness, but he comes even closer, does the work for her, leaning into the mattress. But they're not at level and it's awkward, and that alone convinces her it's real.

"Hi," he laughs, but it's not even amusement, not when she's crying and he's wiping her tears with his thumb and she's trying not to fall apart. "Hey, honey, I've missed you."

"You're _alive_."

"Yeah, course, of course."

There's no _of course_ about it.

She slides her arm around his neck and he takes in a rough breath, going stiff. "Don't - don't pull on me, Beckett. Can't - ah, shit."

She tumbles back, trying not to hurt him, hurt herself, and takes a long look at him. Awake now. Here now.

"What happened - you're in a - what is that?"

"It's a brace. Did something to my shoulder-"

"You were _shot_."

"Well that was first, obviously, but then I broke my collarbone."

She can barely lift her arm; it strains every muscle across her torso and makes her breath pinch painfully in her lungs. But she touches his face, warm, bristly, a little sallow. "Surgery?"

"You had four," he says, nudging in a little closer now. Someone has put the hospital rail down. He's bracing himself with his good elbow against the raised head of the mattress, stroking her hair back from her face, and it feels so good. It feels like home.

"Four," she whispers. "You had four?"

"No, not me. You. How do you feel, Kate?"

"Making it." She's drinking him in with her whole being. "You should be in a hospital bed. They let you stay?"

"No one has to _let_ me. I'm staying."

She doesn't even care if he really can or not; she doesn't care if he's disobeying all the rules either. "Climb up here with me," she says, though she has no idea how she's going to accomplish scooting over to make room when her hips are belted in.

"Can't," he says tightly, a grimace. He leans back just a little and she cranes her neck to follow.

He's in a wheelchair.

For a moment, it's all of her nightmares' horror coming to haunt her, but then Castle pats his knee with a sigh. "Torqued that same place. Not broken, but it's in a flexible knee brace for a few weeks."

She sighs, sinking back into the mattress.

She falls asleep watching him.

 **x**


	5. Follow Her Down

**The Last Battle**

* * *

 _"there she goes and her beauty hurts my heart;_  
 _I follow her down the night, begging her not to depart._

 _-DH Lawrence, Aware_

* * *

 **V. Follow Her Down**

 **x**

He's ashamed that it took so long for him to figure it out. Reality from dreams, nightmares from truth. When he got his shit together, he raised Cain until he managed a transfer to the trauma center where Beckett is.

It just didn't occur to him before. Nothing occurred to him; he was one long reactionary mess, reeling from surgery to surgery, pain to pain, bleak encounter to bleak encounter.

The transfer was an exercise in agony. The hospital had already begun weaning him from morphine, stepping him down to a lighter opiate, but after his experience with his broken knee, his body is so used to codeine that it doesn't make much of a dent.

The ambulance ride to the trauma center put him out for at least twelve hours. Feeling every pothole and sudden stop, he passed out before he arrived, woke up in a strange bed five floors up from ICU. Alexis was at his side, and she was the one to call the nurse and ask for a wheelchair and finally get him down here.

He won't leave. They can all rot in hell. He's not leaving her alone while she sleeps when she could wake at any moment and believe it all a dream.

"Not a dream," he tells her, stroking her swollen fingers resting in his hand. Her arm is bruised on this side from repeated sticks of the IV. Fingers puffy as sausages, like his own but worse. Her skin is white as chalk, dark bruises at her eyes, a yellow tinge to her ears and throat that worry him.

Liver function? Kidneys? All these surgeries on her abdominal cavity and he has no idea what's been done, what emergency measures they had to take to save her. Who okayed those decisions? Maybe Jim; he'll have to ask her father for her medical history.

Or Lanie, when she visits. She'll be able to read the chart, wherever it's been secretly stashed. The white board that covers one wall of her semi-private room holds a jumbled mix of information, GSW = 2, Dilaudid IV alt. h., (isn't that an opiate?), the names of her nurses at night and during the day, her attending, surgeon, and the pain management specialist, plus other notations he does and doesn't understand.

Her breathing sounds depressed, heavy. Like the effort it takes is enormous. He can't remember details, if her lung collapsed, if she was on a vent, what they've done to her to keep her here. He can't put the pieces together, and he knows his own timeline suffers, but his brain still tries to make it all fit.

He's exhausted.

He tries not to lean against her bed because of the tubes and lines and everything, but he finds himself sinking into it.

The wheelchair isn't comfortable. His knee hurts. His shoulder is so alive with pain that it's almost ridiculous; it's almost the only thing he can think about at all - and so much so that it's white noise in his brain, erasing its own existence.

So he tells himself.

One last notation on the white board keeps drawing his eyes.

 _PARA 0. GRAV 0._

He is grateful beyond belief for the detailed research he's done for Rook's stay in ICU after being shot, despite the editor taking out all of those scenes in favor of a jumpstart on the plot. Because, in the beginning, he thought to give Rook and Heat side-by-side recoveries, he knows what that means, knows very clearly what the medical notations GRAV and PARA mean: she's never been pregnant.

Which means she wasn't pregnant when she was shot twice.

Nothing has been lost.

She's alive; he's alive. Dreams do come true.

 **x**

Visiting hours are short in ICU, thirty minutes at a time for anyone other than the round-the-clock person. And because Castle is supposed to be upstairs in his own hospital bed, he's not allowed to be the round-the-clock person. He gets wheeled in to take Jim's place around nine in the morning, and he has to leave at nine in the evening. And in between those times, he's here for an hour, four, twenty minutes, whatever they'll give him, whenever he doesn't have therapy or doctors.

He has to admit it's for the best. He doesn't know what happens to him at night when he's alone - his body seems to shut down entirely and he doesn't wake until Alexis comes to get him the next morning. Besides that limitation, there are medical things being done, appointments for physical therapy and consultations and attendings doing their rounds that he has to show up for, stay put for, and the time he gets to be at Beckett's beside are disjointed and fractured.

Not to mention his own problems with the timeline.

Her room has wi-fi. Of course it does. Why did he think differently?

His brain has played tricks on him since waking, and he has to stop believing the events that happened in the last handful of days are at all accurate or true. Wifi in her ICU hospital room and his daughter brings him one of the iPads from home, plus his phone, and there are no problems with it. No Nurse Ratched to take it all away.

The phone at her bedside calls to an outside line, and often his daughter orders milkshakes from the deli or pizza for the nursing staff at his urging, despite not being able to eat any of it. The nurses all love him, and do their best to cater to him, waking him when he falls asleep beside her or warning him when visitors are on their way.

That thing with Hayley - what was that? Just an ordinary Skype call that he mixed up in his head? He's astonished by just how wrong he's had it this whole time, just how much his daughter and mother have been doing behind the scenes to soothe both of them, to explain over and over again what's happening, what's happened.

He's concocting conspiracies unbeknownst to him. There are no secret cabals here, only pain and healing.

He does that in a hospital room all his own five floors up. He's expected to put in his time there, but he's allowed down for visiting hours. They push his wheelchair with the brace on his knee and the contraption fitted on his shoulder and he gets wheeled right up beside her bed. They unhook the bedside railing and lower it for him, and he leans in and takes her hand and watches her sleep until she wakes.

She only wakes a few times. Cries at seeing him. He promises it's all real, he's real, they're alive, they're not both dead. They play chess on the iPad until it's clear the game is a little beyond both of them, so they switch to Words With Friends, Scrabble games which take an inordinate amount of time. Her fingers are stiff with fluid build up and she has trouble manipulating the tiles on the screen; he often plays both their turns.

She doesn't talk much. When she does, it's to tell him to go back to bed, to tell him to rest, to chide him for not eating the dinner she doesn't eat either.

The nurse takes his vitals when she takes Kate's. It's written on a chart that hangs on the back of his wheelchair. They're going out of their way to accommodate him, them, and he knows some of that is the way Alexis charms them, greasing the wheels, spending his money. But he also knows the biggest portion are the heroics she performed in their own home and now updated on from the mouth of a perky blonde reporter live from the trauma center at noon, six, and eleven.

Alexis or his mother are always somewhere around, and he's finally noticed the security team that's always hovering outside her door.

All of it money well-spent.

Agent Greene comes by every so often to check on her. He asks about Kate and what happened that night in his loft, asks about CIA contacts and Caleb Brown. Castle talks because that's what he does, but he says nothing about anything, preferring to let Beckett take the lead, and for the most part, Beckett is unconscious.

Until she's with it enough to know, he won't say anything.

One night back in his own bed, exhausted beyond his ability to care or perceive, Castle opens his eyes to a shadow in the doorway. Agent Greene has finally come to call on him.

"Mr Castle, please excuse my familiarity."

Castle can't excuse a thing; he's dead tired and the IV is coursing fresh meds through his blood.

Probably why Greene chose this moment to come to him.

"I've tried talking with your wife, but you and I both know she's in no state to talk. To explain."

"Yeah," he sighs, astonished at how easy it is to talk. Truth serum in his IV, but that's another conspiracy theory, most likely. "She has a fifth surgery tomorrow. Scheduled."

"It has to be difficult, watching her in pain, unable to quite connect."

"It's hell." He closes his eyes, startles awake again when he realizes he's still talking. About how he loves her, he's pathetic for her, she's amazing.

Agent Greene settles into the chair at his bedside. "You both impress me," he's answering in turn. "You've both been patient and deliberate, following this thing to the end. Not many would do that, wouldn't just give it up to be safe. How could you be so sure you were well-protected?"

 _My father_. But he can't remember if he's alive or not. If it matters. "Resources," he chokes out, wanting to let go so badly. He can't. Can't.

"NYPD doesn't have these resources."

"Kate does," he sighs. A heaviness settles over him and he welcomes it, this blanket of exhaustion that tucks him into bed every night.

He falls asleep before he can incriminate anyone, before anything wrong passes his lips.

 **x**

His mother is fluffing his pillows (and Castle biting his tongue) when the doctor doing rounds enters the room with his tablet and, incongruously, a ballpoint pen. He taps the blunt cap of the pen to the iPad mini and glances up at Castle.

"Mr Castle. I'm Dr Willhite. How are we this evening?"

He gives a tight-mouthed grimace of a smile. "Put in my place," he admits. He catches his mother's eye and she gestures as if to lock her lips with a key.

"What?" Dr Willhite glances between them. "Oh, the collarbone? No, don't worry about that. It was precarious to begin with. I had a note on here: Dr Mishra was waiting for his regular anesthetist to take you into surgery again, so you merely upped his timetable."

"Oh." He blinks and shakes his head. On to the most important part. "When can I get out of here?"

"We'll see how you're doing with pain management, take it as it comes."

"And that would be when?" His wife is five floors down and she's having trouble remembering he's alive. She's only reassured when he's there; she's have five surgeries on her guts and decisions are being made without him because he's doped up on pain pills or he's out of the room.

He doesn't like not being in control, doesn't like people crowding him and telling him what he should be doing. No wonder she disappeared for three months that summer, gunshot and gunshy.

"We'll see, Mr Castle."

"Tomorrow," he presses. "The day after? I was supposed to hear about being discharged on Thursday-"

"That's today," the doctor says, smiling deftly. "So, no. That won't be happening."

 _Today_ is Thursday? How much time does he keep losing? What _month_ is it?

"Not today, of course," Castle agrees. He thinks he sounds fairly good-natured, but that might not be true. He tries to keep his tone modulated, smooth despite the rawness to his voice from where they intubated him for surgery. "But soon. My wife is in ICU. I'm-"

"I know you're itching to get out of here," Dr Willhite smiles. "We'll work on it. See how you do in the next 48 hours, revisit this conversation. Best I can give you, Mr Castle."

As he leaves, Castle checks the phone his daughter brought him ages ago.

It's already June.

He has no idea where the time has gone.

 **x**

Her face glows as he's wheeled into her room. She's been turned onto her side, her arms curled up into her chest, so that if he squints, they're at home in bed having just woken up, Kate sweet-talking him into oral sex.

He never needed the sweet-talk, the outrageous claims and strokes to his ego, but he _likes_ it, always did like it, hearing it out of her mouth. It was all for show, and she knew it, and he knew it, but it was still fun that way.

The look on her face now is that same look - pleased, thrilled. She's halfway through the IV bag, which is good timing on his part, so he might chalk it up to the drugs, but he's going to attribute her joy to this instead: he's standing out of the wheelchair and leaning in against her bedside.

"Hey, babe, you can stand," she hums, those dark eyes blown wide with opiates.

"Knee brace is gone," he grins. "Faster than they expected."

"You were a good boy," she murmurs, eyelids drooping.

"For you, I was," he answers, tracing a line along her eyebrow. "Kate?"

She struggles to open her eyes. "You're here."

"And how are we doing this morning?" comes a booming voice. One of her doctors.

Castle turns only his head, not wanting to risk twisting his knee, and finds the tall, rangy woman from before striding into Kate's room. She has that ropy musculature of rugby players and cross country runners, and she's taller even than Castle. A harsh handsomeness to her face makes his tongue stick to the roof of his mouth and all the words desert him.

Striking women always do that to him, especially when he's still on pain killers.

"Kate, how are you feeling? Can you rate your pain?"

That does the trick. While Kate mumbles something about threes and sweet potatoes (she's seriously more loopy than seems necessary), Castle finds his words once more. "Actually, that's something I'd like to talk to you about, Dr... ah, I'm sorry but so much of this has been a whirlwind. What was your name-"

"Dr Ray," she answers, offering a hand as she juggles the chart, her tablet, and her phone. "We've met a few times, but I think you were on heavier doses than she was then."

He can't even form a coherent statement to that.

Ray goes on without him, brisk and businesslike. "Her father has been making medical decisions, but he's signed the form and released her care back to you. I hope you're feeling with it enough to make those choices, Mr Castle, because she's in a tricky spot and we're doing some new things."

"How - what - is she okay?"

"She's definitely better than she was. Opioids are far too often the go-to drug for acute, postoperative pain, Mr Castle. It's been clear to me that Ms Beckett-"

The one whom they're speaking of finally rouses. "Kate, it's Kate," she mumbles, and her hand catches at his elbow where he's still bent over her. "What's going on."

"Talking about post-op care," he whispers, leaning in to brush his kiss over her forehead. "This is the pain management specialist."

"Feel pretty good," she sighs, her lashes closing. "Now you're here."

And that's it. She's out. Beautiful, weary, faded, but out.

He lifts his head and finds Dr Ray waiting on him. "She's intolerant of opioids, cumulatively," he tells her, remembering at the last second those key phrases Lanie told him to use. "Right after surgery, she's okay, but in twenty-four hours, it's built up. She's nauseated, throws up, tears the stitches-"

"I know, we know," Dr Ray says clearly. "Her father and I have had this conversation, and so let me explain everything to you. First of all, we have a synergistic approach to pain management at the trauma center. As I was saying, opioids are used far too often as a blanket approach. We use a combination of drugs - mostly acetaminophen and NSAIDs - with a lower dose of codeine, achieving an optimal pain relief with minimum toxicity. You, on the other hand, were treated by a different hospital and were on much higher doses of opioids than I'd recommend."

Toxicity is what he hears, but the rest of it at least sounds good. "I have to admit it's a struggle to follow everything," he confesses, glancing anxiously to Kate. She's heavy-lidded but he's not sure she's asleep. "Only recently have I felt clear-headed myself. All I know is that the Vicodin and Dilaudid make her feel worse, make her cry-"

"She's not on either of those right now," Dr Rays answers. "I promise you we are well aware of her medical history, and her father has done a good job making informed decisions. Dr Parish has also been privy to all of our conversations, and she's urged Mr Beckett to take appropriate action. I suggest you consult with them before making any choices about her medical care."

"Right now I don't plan on changing anything, if that's what you're getting at," he says. His fingers curl around Kate's, rubbing the swollen length of her thumb. He kisses the spot. "She seems to always be out of it, but-"

"For right now, Mr Castle, that's exactly what you want. Pain is debilitating, crippling. It can quickly lead to depression, which she is especially at risk for directly after major surgery. The longer she's - as you put it - out of it, the more her body has a chance to heal."

He swallows, nodding automatically in response. As much as he longs to have her eyes open and _know_ him, as wrong as it feels to answer the same three questions over and over, she _is_ healing. She's getting stronger, able to be awake longer.

"About the NSAIDs," he finally says, getting himself together. He turns his head to look at Dr Ray, who seems to be waiting for him to accept her judgment. "That's like ibuprofen and aspirin, right?"

"Exactly."

"But NSAIDs are risky for those with heart conditions?"

Dr Ray glances quickly to Kate's chart, and then her eyes dart back up to his face. "Yes." A question in her voice.

"Is that the same as having had heart surgery?" He struggles now to fit all the pieces together, where he was going with this, why it felt so important this morning when he came down to her room. "Because she had heart surgery."

"She... had heart surgery when? I have no record of blockage-"

"No, it wasn't - not because of a heart condition. Unless you count being shot in the heart a heart condition," Castle finishes weakly. He shakes his head, his attention distracted by the fall of limp hair across Kate's cheek. "I want to be sure that having her heart operated on doesn't create the exact kind of conditions you're supposed to be on guard against with NSAIDs." He's not sure that came out right.

Dr Ray has been checking the paper chart while he talks, and now she flips to the tablet in her hand and skims. "When she was shot previously, in 2011, she had heart surgery to repair damage done by the bullet, some shearing to the muscle of the right atrium and the tricuspid valve. I see."

Castle stands there, watching her read, and evidently he did something right. His writer's brain put details together that others perhaps hadn't. His wife hasn't had a previous heart condition, which would put her at risk if using NSAIDs, but in many ways she _has_ had a heart condition - the condition of being shot.

"I'll look into it," Dr Ray says finally. "I would like to say that a healthy woman in her late thirties isn't at risk with NSAIDs, but we are using high doses and I don't like to generalize. I'll do some research."

Castle lets out a breath he didn't realize he was holding.

"In the meantime," Ray says, checking her Apple watch with a narrow eye, "she's due for the acetaminophen cocktail next. We'll put a hold on the NSAIDs. I'll get back to you by shift change."

The blonde giant that is her pain management specialist shakes his hand authoritatively and begins to leave.

And only then does Castle realize she reminds him of a character from 'Game of Thrones.'

He eases down into the chair at Kate's bedside, squeezing her hand. "You missed it, Kate. Brienne of Tarth is one of your docs."

Kate doesn't even twitch.

 **x**


	6. So Light

**The Last Battle**

* * *

 _I'm not the only one that love makes feel like a dozen_ _  
_ _flapping bedsheets being ripped to prayer flags by the wind.  
_ _When I stand in full sun I feel I have been falling headfirst for decades.  
_ _God, I am so transparent.  
_ _So light._

 _-Cut Lilies, Noah Warren_

* * *

 **VI. So Light**

 **x**

Dreams pull reality into taffy, making it all sag and sink, warping the things she knows to be true.

Her ICU night nurse has all the right answers now, when Kate wakes like this.

"It's okay. You're in the ICU. Your husband is a few floors up, doing good. You're both doing so good."

It takes a few litanies for the truth to sink in.

And then reality reforms. Holds a little more firmly. She takes a gasping breath and the oxygen gets to her brain, starts kicking out the things that aren't true. "I was shot," she pants, trying to breathe more, more air, more oxygen, more truth. "He was shot - on the floor, I-"

"That was nearly a month ago now. You're here."

"Here," she croaks.

"He's in his own bed," the nurse soothes. Fingers at her elbow, taking her pulse in time to the monitors. Old school nurse. Grey hair, spiky on top, cool blue eyes. Kate likes her. "You leave him in his own bed, Kate. You hear me? He needs some real sleep."

"Hear - hear you," she pants. "Real sleep."

"Let's work on calming down our breathing," the nurse goes on. "Deep breaths."

She tries. She is trying.

"Better, that's better. You're doing good."

She's doing _miserably_ but the nurse is too nice. "Castle?"

"He's a few floors up. Sleeping now, honey. If you can give us a few more days, you'll be moved to the stepdown unit. And I'm sure he'll be working on getting you two together."

Together would be good. Her hands are shaking; her chest feels heavy.

"You were on the opiate overnight," the nurse says calmly. Did Kate ask? Is the nurse reading her mind? "It makes you feel like this, but it also lets you sleep. I'll talk to the pain specialist and see about knocking it down a little. We'll know better for tomorrow, won't we?"

Will she?

"Deep breaths, Kate. You're doing good."

Castle.

"He's right upstairs. You saw him all day, remember? He came by with flowers. See those on the table."

She shifts her eyes wildly in the semi-dark, spots the huge spray of white calla lilies. They have pale purple tongues, purple down inside. "Made me cry," she remembers now. She cried.

Calla lilies. It all starts pouring in afresh, the flowers in his lap and Alexis wheeling him, the hug his daughter gave her around the neck, cheek to cheek, and then Castle easing himself up to standing and presenting those flowers and how she cried just to have him.

"Much better, breathing sounds good. Heart rate is returning to normal. That's good, Kate. No panic attack tonight."

That does sound good.

She lifts a hand and finds the ring on its chain around her neck, hooks it with a finger.

And breathes.

 **x**

She wakes alone. Darkness outside the window at far end, and the shroud of it nominally inside. A light burns at the nurses' station outside her cubicle, the monitors have their orange and green indicators. It might be morning. It might be midnight.

She lays there trying to piece herself together.

Hospital, ICU, they're promising the stepdown unit sometime in the hazy near-future. Five doctors she knows by face, or by the 'Game of Thrones' name Castle has for them, and a list of questions. Five surgeries. Her guts are beginning to settle back into place, and so is her mind.

She takes a shallow breath, deep breaths make her feel like crying, and she attempts to turn over.

It does not go well. She has to stop.

She is, however, more awake and made aware that she is not alone at all.

"Rick," she whispers. Raises her voice to something more mild but less rasping. "Rick?"

He does wake, in stages, and she shuts up long enough to watch. The twitch of his fingers on top of his chest, the ripple across his features as he goes from slack to under his cognizant control. The mild startle and then his eyes opening, his head turning to her from the empty bed beside her own. He must have pulled back the curtain to keep watch over her.

He opens his mouth and instead of words there is a groan. He closes his eyes again.

"Take your time," she insists, staying quiet, her eyes hungry on him. For how he's doing, if he really manages. Hungry to see his true face and not the one he has in place by the time her own eyes open in the morning.

It is, apparently, just as much effort or more as it is for her.

"Rick," she sighs, and this time the tears do come, and out, streaking down her cheek rolling back to her ears, soaked up by the flat hospital pillow. She can still see his lilies in their long vase at the bedside table, but she doesn't try to swipe at the tears. He presses a hand to his good shoulder as if to balance out the pain.

"I'm - okay. Almost."

"Don't get up," she tells him. "Stay."

"Did you need me?"

"I want to turn over," she admits. "But I'll call the nurse." She _needs_ to turn. Her hips and back, her _ribs_ , they all feel fragile and yet weighted down. "When did you convince them to let you sleep on the extra bed?"

"I didn't. I just took it."

"Rick," she chides. "You should be in bed."

His throat works as he swallows. "I am in bed." How many times has she seen that profile? The harsh angle of his nose, the mountain of his chin, the so broad forehead, the spike of his hair. With morning light limning his lashes or moonlight casting his cheeks blue. The occasional flares of lightning during a thunderstorm.

"Remember our rainstorm?" she says, hoping to distract him.

He lifts a hand and his fingers make some kind of conductor's move, apropos of nothing. "Mm, yes."

"I was crazy for you," she whispers. "I was going to have you. No matter what you said or did, I was going to have you. I chose you. It was so easy. And then you opened the door and you - were furious. And hurt."

"Damn right."

She grins. "You slammed me against the door. After breaking my heart."

"Tit for tat," he says. He knows this story, they've been over this story, dissected themselves in it before. "Besides, you liked it."

"Which part?"

"All parts," he says back, and she can see the flash of his grin. "We can call that the first in a series I like title naked punishment. You call the nurse?"

Startled, she glances to the call button. "No, I-"

"Press the button, Kate. Don't lie there in pain for no damn reason. Don't punish yourself. Leave that to me."

She almost laughs. It's funny and not. Maybe more true than it should be. She presses the nurse call button at the railing of the bed. "Done," she sighs.

"What did you want to say about thunderstorms?"

"They make me wet."

It only takes him half a beat. "You're supposed to bring an umbrella."

She does laugh then, groaning as it causes pain to clamp like a vise around her lungs. "Shit. Stop doing that."

"I've learned you like a little pain."

She groans harder, but of course he's right in that too. "What's - it say about you?" she forces out, breathing shallowly to get it under control again. Less opiates, they say. More functionality, more consciousness, she says. All good. But for these odd hours when it begins to get out of hand.

"Says I married the most amazing woman in the universe. Takes a licking and keeps on ticking."

"You were golden until you trotted out the trite cliche."

It's his turn to laugh. They're just lying there, separate beds, sighing with sad amusement, not really moving. Barely looking at each other.

Then the cubicle door opens with a whoosh as the nurse steps inside, heading for the sink to wash her hands even though she used antibacterial rinse outside the room as well. "What seems to be the prob-" She startles at the sink, having just come far enough in the room to see them. "Ah. Mr Castle. You're supposed to be upstairs."

"I sneaked out. Well, I hid, really, and then came back."

"And managed to crawl into the extra bed?"

"Don't tell on me. Alexis helped. Hell, these painkillers give me verbal diarrhea."

"Gross, Castle." Laughing again.

"I'm afraid I'll have to wheel you back upstairs," she sighs at him, lips curving. She turns to Kate. "You need to move to your side?"

"Yeah," she says miserably. Now Castle will have to leave. "But - can he stay until I fall asleep again?"

It's Castle's turn to offer pitiful eyes, and the nurse gives way, frowning at herself as if she can't believe she's letting them get to her.

From his stolen spot, Castle gives her a thumbs up over the nurse's shoulder.

She holds her breath and waits for the pain.

 **x**

He's been calling it True Confession time, a game they play, and if she's honest, she likes it.

Giving voice to petty things that, in the light of dual shootings, matter not at all. So many harbored things, let loose from the dock of her being and set to drift. Immaterial.

She likes it. His fingers play with her fingers, trail up to her wrist, and she can have her eyes open or closed, either way, and she's still in the game.

"True confession," he says, gravel in his voice.

"Drink some water," she nags, opening her eyes. "Dehydrated, talking to me all day."

He obeys, then puts the straw to her lips with a raised eyebrow, daring her to follow her own advice. She sips at the water, feels sicks the second it hits her stomach, has to close her eyes.

"I had Esposito go down to Archives and pull your mother's case. He gave it to me."

She opens her eyes, can't fathom why he looks like that. "Okay. Was it down there? I thought I had it in my office." A pause as her sliding sense of where she is begins to come back to her. "Oh, that's his office now. Tell Espo it's in the second file cabinet," she mumbles.

"No, Kate, not now. Then. When we - were still new. After you told me about her. That's the first thing I did. Bribed Javi into letting me down there. I took photos on my phone, made copies on the Archive's machine."

She laughs, hissing as the laughter wakes the problem places in her guts. "Ouch. Oh, ow. That hurts." At the look on his face. "Not you. Me. Ow."

"Tylenol ain't cutting it?" he quips, his smile crooked. That look haunts his face anyway. "But why are you laughing?"

"Oh, just-" she has to breathe through that "-how life goes. I don't care. How could I care? Ages ago. Ages and ages."

"You're alive," he finishes for her.

" _You're_ alive," she stresses.

"Same words."

"Different meaning."

"Same meaning," he argues. The other is alive, yes, but to be alive together is of infinite worth.

"Okay, point for you," she murmurs. In this True Confession game, it seems like he keeps getting all the points.

"Espo made me promise to never tell you. Even after Roy's funeral, he told me specifically I wasn't to tell you."

"Mm." She doesn't care. It doesn't matter. Has no meaning here and now. So what? "I fought too many battles. Have been. That's one I can lay to rest."

"Good." His body comes in closer and his lips glance off her cheekbone. "Your color looks better." Another kiss against the corner of her mouth, though she can feel the tension in his lips, how he's struggling to stay balanced over her. "Tylenol maybe really is doing the trick."

"Not the Tylenol. Or lidocaine. Or NSAIDs. No... true confession," she promises, explains.

He lifts up just enough to look her in the eyes. "Yeah?"

"I'm rather hopelessly dependent on you," she whispers.

"On me?"

"Seeing your face every morning," she tries. Tears are rushing to the corners of her eyes and he shakes his head, starts to brush them away. "You're here."

"God," he whispers back, leaning in over her. "True confession, Kate, loving you guts me out."

 **x**


	7. No Victories

**The Last Battle**

* * *

 _"I've spent most of my life walking behind this badge, and I can tell you this for a fact... there are no victories, there's only the battle. And the best that you could hope for is that you find some place where you can make your stand."_

 _-Knockout, Castle (written by Will Beall)_

* * *

 **VII. No Victories**

 **x**

Family, friends, he really does appreciate it, everything they're doing for him, for Kate. Their separate and yet conjoined recoveries take work, and the people in their lives are doing a good share of it.

But he is sick to death of entertaining.

His mother has always required a specific kind of balance, one he chafed under when she moved back in with him, but one he has perfected over the years. It's difficult now, when the effort of movement alone causes so much resulting ache, to have his mind on what his mother needs, the lines he ought to speak, the validation he should give back like applause. The flowers aren't for her performance, they're for his, and that has never gone over well with her.

When he fails to read his lines, when he bows out of her scene and says the nasty thing instead, she dismisses him as she usually does, a roll of her eyes, a scoff, playing it off, but he knows his growling has struck deep, that she's not unaffected.

None of them are.

But he keeps doing it. Barking out his frustration with the way he can't even get out of bed without help. Biting her head off when she acts shallow (it is an _act_ , and he knows that, and yet he lets it get to him. Can't she just, for once, drop it and be _real_ , be who she is, stop playing the part? He is so damn tired of the curtain calls, the encores, the scene changes.)

 _Coping mechanisms, babe_ , Kate whispers at his ear. _Don't begrudge her._

Kate isn't really in his ear, of course; she isn't here. But he hears her voice anyway, like a conscience, and he apologizes with a weak joke, and his mother shines again.

And then his daughter comes to sit with him, nervous stories and high heels with wool skirts in strangely bright colors that clash with the too-red of her hair, and he has to try for her too. It's always _trying_ with her here, not like it has been before. She's brittle in places he hasn't seen since her kidnapping, since Paris, and it irritates him because he's impotent in the face of her fear, her grief. He isn't the father to her she deserves; he hasn't shielded her.

No matter she never wanted it, no matter she's an adult.

 _It gets better. You know, firsthand_. Kate's voice in his ear again. _You had to watch me struggle, and now she's watching you._

But he never got to watch Kate struggle, did he? And he isn't struggling, really. He's healing, things are on track, bones healing, muscles knitting together. If his lungs rasp at night when the bed is laid all the way back, it's only to be expected, after everything, all the damage done. If his shoulder aches with every movement, well, he was _shot_. He's lucky it wasn't a mortal wound, as Esposito recounts it, considering how close Caleb Brown was.

 _How_ close was he? In the kitchen, Castle knows that much, but what he actually remembers without help is muddled, difficult to perceive. He understands now why Kate never spoke up about his confession in the cemetery as she lay dying. What piss-poor timing he had, seriously, what an ass he was after, hurt feelings because she didn't have the courage to say anything back.

Of course she didn't. He can barely remember the entire _week_ leading up to getting shot; there are great gaps in his understanding of the events, that final case, and to remember specifically what anyone said in those last moments-

Impossible. He was in the kitchen, but he has no idea why. She was in the bedroom and came out, shooting, at hearing the first bullet? or voices?, but why Castle himself wasn't with her, why he hadn't gone straight to the bedroom with her - clueless. Too much of that night is smeared with blood and pain, and nothing will come with any order or certainty.

His life flashed before his eyes, and what his life could have been, and _that_ is much more vivid to him than real memory.

He understands Kate so much better now, those months she took to heal alone. He's not handling this well.

His daughter, his mother - dealing with their grief, their inability to process, their issues alone - that would be enough. _Kate_ would be enough. But it's everyone else coming through here. Hayley and her gruff demeanor and her promises that they're locked down, secure, no one is getting to his family through her guys. He can't keep it up; he's too exhausted to placate her, to figure out why she looks so guilty and for what.

His hospital room is a revolving door. Esposito, Ryan, LT, Lanie, Vikram, Mother, Alexis, Hayley, Agent Greene, other officers from the Twelfth, even Stegner who was transferred out of the Twelfth after that _first year_ Castle began consulting - they all show up at the foot of his bed during painful physical therapy or right when he's finally gotten into a position that doesn't kill him.

They want absolution. Or answers. They want to see for themselves. And none of them have the guts to visit Kate. So he's their go-to.

And he is worn out.

But he can't sleep. His chest hurts. Everything hurts. He can't sleep again. It's a battle he's given up.

 **x**

The night shift nurse, as she's going off duty, pops her head into his room as he stares up at the ceiling. She asks if he wants, and he groans _please,_ and she comes back with the wheelchair. She rolls him out of his hospital room and down the corridor, and she even knows to make the big loop around so that none of his people in the waiting room will see them.

On the elevator, she doesn't talk, and he works on sitting upright without the ache showing on his face. Kate will notice, and she won't be pleased with him, but he tries to hide it anyway, masking his features.

The nurse rolls him off the elevator and through the ICU ward, each two-bed cubicle partitioned off with a closed plexiglass door to prevent the spread of infection. Beckett has the room to herself, and sometimes he's been able to lie down there, their heads turned and eyes meeting, both too worn out to speak.

Sometimes he stands and hovers at her bedside, inspecting the bruises under her eyes and the puffiness to her skin and the peek of bandages under the hospital gown. But not often. He struggles with standing these days, thrown off balance by the elaborate brace on his shoulder that should keep his bones from grinding.

Sometimes he sits in the wheelchair because it's all he can do just to sit.

It's going to be one of those days.

"Here we are," the nurse says, rolling him over the threshold of Kate's cubicle. "Leave you right here. Let me tell them you're back here."

"I'm sure they expect it," Castle says, but he appreciates how close the nurse has rolled him to Kate's side. The bed is a bulky thing with hydraulics for raising and lowering, for putting the head back, plus all these connections in the railing for lines and power. Makes it hard to _get_ to her, but at least he's close.

The nurse leaves, the door hisses shut, and he's alone with his wife.

Beckett is asleep. Her form in the bed is both everything and nothing, too slight for his liking, too folded up for her to be comfortable.

She has compression boots on her feet to keep her blood circulating - no one quite knows why the edema is still so prevalent - and the pulse-ox on her finger. A heart monitor because of the high-dose NSAIDs and the opioids, and the ever-ready breathing machine in case her system ever becomes too depressed. She had instances in the beginning, he was told, where her breathing was erratic, but they're certain it was a reaction to the anesthesia and opioids for pain.

Castle is not willing to be so trusting.

Yet, still she breathes.

He carefully takes her head, grinding his teeth at the shift in his chest, the bone on bone feeling. He flares his nostrils, studies her intently just to keep his mind on something else. Her left hand to his, neither of them able to wear their wedding rings, and he drags his eyes up to her hospital gown, looking for that telltale bump of the chain with _their_ band, rather than her mother's.

"Creepy now," she mumbles, eyes slowly opening. "Hey, you." A hard swallow, a slow blink of her eyes. "Time's it?"

"Late," he admits. "Early. You should be asleep."

"You too."

"Can't." She gives a flicker of the old raised eyebrow, and he takes it for what it is. "I know," he confesses. "I'll stop telling you what to do."

"Mm."

"Sleep if you can-"

"Castle," she husks. Her voice always sounds like this in the morning, like she's been screaming awake from nightmares. And he knows she's had them; her night nurse told him so.

In response, he's found himself getting here earlier and earlier until being wheeled down by the night nurse going off shift has become a habit. "Dreams?" he whispers. The thought of her waking alone, to a nurse, without the instant feedback of his body beside hers to tell her it's only a dream, it's not real, haunts him.

"Usual ones. Yours?"

"Can't sleep long enough to find them," he gives back. Grimaces at the dismay in her eyes. "It's okay, Kate. Just - everything hurts. And they're stingy with the pain meds. They send in this guy to play a harp."

She grunts with something like a laugh. "Gotta stay on top of the pain or it gets the best of you," she tells him, words pronounced carefully. Her lashes are dark stains against her cheek. She opens her eyes again. "Listening to me? Have to stay on top-"

"I heard."

"Tell someone. You need-"

"I will," he promises. Fervently. Anything.

"'Cause they're supposed to be tailored to your-"

"I know, honey." It keeps falling out of his mouth, these terms of endearment they don't use. He's found himself doing it to her all the time now, and even though that was a habit with Alexis when she was little, (pumpkin stuck, but there have been angel, and baby bird, and sweetie), there's something about Kate Beckett that defies endearments.

He has to stop acting like she's going to die. She's not dying.

"Ask Brienne," Kate sighs, eyes on him. "Brienne of Tarth. She'll hook you up."

He chuckles, surprised she remembered, and finds himself leaning into the bed railing, his ribs catching on the hard plastic. His shoulder aches, but he welcomes it. With the ache comes clarity, a sense of the correct order of events that he's not had since waking up in the other hospital. The less pain meds, more with it he is.

Kate's fingers dapple against his. "Since we're naming them. Your night shift nurse - your lady of the night," she says, her words formed carefully in her mouth. She's definitely still getting the drug cocktail. "She's Ros, Littlefinger's prostitute. The one from Winterfell."

He laughs harder, leaning full against the railing now. "I hadn't realized you were playing such close attention. You always seemed to hate that show."

"Not hate," she says. Her eyes stray and then come back, a renewed concentration. "Like it okay."

"You sure do know a lot of details for just liking it okay." He strokes the roundness of her finger, back and forth, and she lifts it, hooks it with his.

"I'm a cop. Can't help remembering details."

He grins, their fingers lightly battling. "Ros is nice to me. Brings me down here even though she's technically off her shift."

"Always have a way with 'em," Kate smiles back. Fainter this time, eyes dimming.

"With who?" he pretends.

"Prostitutes."

He laughs again, caught once more mostly by the way she's following their conversation. He didn't see that one coming, and she's smiling back, though her eyes are closed.

"Gonna fall asleep, Rick."

"Go ahead. My 'lady of the night,' as you call it, is off. Just you and me."

"And an entire trauma center."

"Semantics."

She's still smiling when she falls back to sleep.

 **x**

"I had a fight with Alexis." He sighs heavily and sinks his head down to the space at the head of her bed. "And Hayley. I think I yelled."

"I know."

"How do you know?"

"Alexis came down here after. We talked."

"Why?" he asks, bewildered.

"Could hurt a third wife's feelings, asking _why_ like that."

He grunts, lifts his head; she looks amused, though her eyes are closed. He lays his head back down, tired himself. It's been a bad day, bad series of days, for them both. "Meant, why is she bothering you. Why - that doesn't sound better, does it?"

"Not really. But I understand. Hurts too much to try to get it right."

He closes his eyes as well.

"She said she came down to remind herself of why you're acting like a brat. Because I'm here and you're there and you can't stand it."

"I can't stand it," he whispers. He _hates_ going back to his room.

"She says you need people, and you're stuck in that room. Do you need people, Rick?"

"I need you. You're my people."

He feels her shifting and he tenses, lifting his head to stay her. She draws her hand up though and catches the side of his face, her eyes intent on his. "Your daughter. Your mother. Hayley. Espo and Ryan. They're our people too. Please don't-"

 _make them hate me._

"-drive them away when you need them most."

He slumps back to the mattress, closes his eyes. Her hand stays with him, begins stroking the side of his face. "I fought with my mother, too."

She sighs. "Rick."

"I understand you so much better now," he mutters, tilting until his forehead rests against her shoulder. Lightly, the bed taking most of his weight. She still strokes her fingers in his hair. "Getting shot sucks. Makes me not a nice person."

A strangled noise from her throat that he'll count as a laugh. Her cheek comes to the top of his head. "Did you sulk or did you argue the true definition of irony again?"

He huffs.

"Ah, irony it is, then," she murmurs. "You're insufferable, you know, telling people you're always right."

"Damn. No more lidocaine for you."

She grunts this time, grips his hair, but she puts her lips to the top of his head. "A little blunt?"

"Little bit."

"Getting shot sucks. Makes me not a nice person."

He smiles, and he knows she can feel it. "I fell in love with you because you knew the proper definition of irony. It's not the same as coincidence. It's not when something's funny-"

She tugs his hair. "You're doing it again," she whispers. "And I've used irony incorrectly at least a hundred times since that day in the car-"

He laughs and lifts his head, her fingers against his lips. "You remember."

She rolls her eyes, but immediately stiffens, presses her mouth into a flat, bleak line. Lines around her eyes, everything tense, pain written clearly across her face, whole paragraphs of pain.

"Breathe," he reminds her, half afraid she really won't, mostly just powerless. He can do nothing. "No more eye-rolling at me."

"No more laughing at you," she corrects tightly. Trying to smile at him, but the pain fills up her eyes. "Ah, shit. And you-"

"No more arguing with my mother over irony," he says quickly, talking to distract her. "Even though the English language is being made impotent with every occurrence of incorrect usage-"

"Insufferable," she stresses, though that could be due to the way she's drawn up into herself, breathing hard through the pain. "Castle." Her voice pitches up, breaks. "God."

"It's okay," he says inanely. "It's okay, Kate. Go ahead. It's fine. I'll be here when you wake."

She lifts her eyes to the ceiling, lips twisting, but her free hand fumbles out of his and clutches the controller of the pain pump. Two sharp jabs, desperate. He sees the moment it washes over, relief like a wave, and her eyes sink closed, her body releasing into the mattress.

"It's okay," he sighs. "It's okay. I'm not jealous at all."

But even though his shoulder bones seem to be grinding away at his nerve endings, he stays right where he is, doesn't move.

He falls asleep awkwardly propped against the bed railing with his head touching her shoulder.

It's a deep sleep.

 **x**

"It's moving day," he says cheerfully, not bothering to get out of the wheelchair.

She turns her head to him, slowly, her eyes the dark of secret pools in the woods. "Moving day?"

Two of the biggest nurses have followed his attendant inside Kate's cubicle and the cramped sparseness of the place is made harshly evident by their bulk. The bald one with earrings curved all the way up his cartilage leans in over Kate and starts flipping buttons on the monitors. "It's the stepdown unit for you," he says, as if chiding.

Castle can see they have a rapport. Kate grumbles to the man, whose biceps flex as he moves, and Castle would be nudging himself forward, showing her his immature rich boy side, but he's just too damn tired to care.

And really, what is there to care about? He hopes all of her nurses have been kind and funny, he hopes the nights alone in her bed with nightmares haven't been for her what they've been for him, dark and lonely and painful.

Mr Clean is explaining the process of moving from ICU to the stepdown unit while the second nurse attaches her IV to a pole over the bed, begins releasing the locks on the frame. The mattress comes up off the bed, and it's that ensemble they transfer to the gurney.

She grunts and closes her eyes, Mr Clean soothes with low words.

He clears his throat and her attention is drawn straight to him. He offers a bare smile. "Worked it out. You're with me for the rest of our - well, my - stay."

"You get out soon?" she says, eyebrows raising as if in hope. But it's the last thing he wants, to leave her here.

"Don't know yet," he admits.

She nods, swallowing as she tilts her chin up. She's flat on her back like this, and his attendant - a hospital volunteer with a swinging blonde ponytail who takes corners a little too fast for his shoulder's liking - turns him around to follow her bed out.

"Where-" Kate chokes.

"Right here," he calls, feels her panic leech onto him, sucking out the last of his energy. "I'm coming in hot behind you, Kate."

"Phrasing," she mumbles. He almost doesn't hear it, but he laughs as he catches it, some of the bleak heaviness breaking up in his chest.

"Your tv stuck on FX too?" he says, just as the candy striper pushes him even with Kate's gurney in the hallway.

His wife turns her head to him, and she closes her eyes, gives him a small nod. "Bout full up with that cartoon," she whispers.

"I think it's Espo," he whispers back, taking it from pain to confidential secrets. He leans in close. "He giggles like a girl when he watches 'Archer' in my room."

Her lips turn up on one side, though her eyes stay closed. "Mm. That's what it is. You figured it out. You must be a private dick or something."

He chuckles, gives back the joke. " _Phrasing_ , hot stuff."

She smiles, and he thinks her body is beginning to relax, but as the bed bumps over the elevator's threshold, her eyes flare open, wide. He can see how vividly the jostling affects her. The nudge of the wheelchair's wheels over that same metal strip don't hit him like that, but it could be that's because he's been in and out of this elevator a hundred times in the last two months.

"You okay?" he says quietly, leaning in close as the doors shut.

She lifts a finger, her body unmoving.

"Sorry, babe, I would," he chokes out, battling back frustration. "But you're on my bad side." In fact, just leaning in like this makes his chest burn and his shoulder cry out. "I'm so sorry you hurt."

Her head turns at that, and he sees the tear slip out of her eye, but she smiles. "That's okay. Anything to be in the same room with you."

He lets out a rough breath, smiling back at her. "Yeah. Feels like old times, right? Soon enough I'll get you in bed with me."

Maybe that's a laugh. It's something anyway. "More like get you in bed with me."

 **x**


	8. Equidistant

**The Last Battle**

* * *

 _One day I'll learn. I'll prove  
_ _I know how to lie with you without  
_ _anticipating the scorecards of your eyes,  
_ _how I might merely abide—we two  
_ _unseated, equidistant from the wings  
_ _in a beating black box, all stage._

 _Kyle Dargan, 'The Erotic Is a Measure Between'_

* * *

 **VIII. Equidistant**

 **x**

Her body aches.

It's not that she forgets that it hurts; that's not possible. She simply aches all the time, and now there are multiple instances of physical therapy in which the smiling or stern therapists manipulate her legs until her abdominal muscles clench and spasm and tears spill out of her eyes, reminding her all over again that there are worse things than ache - there is this.

Castle is here or not here, doing his own physical therapy in the room down the hall with a handful of ambulatory patients. She's not technically supposed to be on this floor; this isn't the stepdown unit, but he's persuaded someone and donated heavily to the trauma center on top of that and then there's the publicity part of things. He gave an interview with his surgeons at a wide, polyester-covered table with microphones. She watched on the tv mounted to the ceiling in the corner of the room with his mother at her bedside.

He comes back after his PT with a different look of frustration than his usual, and she sees following right behind him is a man in a dark suit, looking as if he owned the place.

"Captain Beckett," he says, half-bowing in some awkward attempt at respect. Behind him is Esposito, and she has a faint stirring of memory in the dregs of her consciousness.

"Do I know you?" she says, her voice rougher than usual. She can't remember if she was asleep the whole time Castle was gone, but her own PT usually does wipe her out. "Espo, who is this?"

"Agent Greene," the man says, stepping in front of Esposito and holding out his hand. "We've met, but I don't mind reintroducing myself." When she fails to lift her arm and shake - she _can't_ , asshole - he drops his hand. "I'm with the AG's office, just shadowing your acting captain here."

Oh, right. She does remember something like that, Captain Espo. It's-

"Mr Castle, Captain Beckett, I just have a few follow up questions."

"Follow up," she hoarses. Which means there were other questions at an earlier time. She has no idea what she's told him, what they were about. "Can you fill me in first on what we've talked about previously?"

"Oh, there's no need," Greene says brightly.

Castle shuffles forward, grips the railing of her bedside. She can hear him breathing; PT must have been a bitch. He jabs a finger in Greene's direction. "There is a need. She wants to know. So start talking."

Kate digs her teeth into her bottom lip to keep from smiling, so pleased to hear his growl in defense of her. He sounds better than he did this morning, though the prospect of PT is enough to sink anyone's good spirits.

"That's not necessary," Greene says to Castle. "I won't make you suffer through my retelling. And really, it's not like you're allowed on this case, so you'll excuse me if I keep back some of the details."

Even propped up in a hospital bed, her skin thin as paper and the bruises under her eyes from exhaustion and blood loss, the look she levels on Agent Greene actually makes him take a step back. "Then charge me for obstruction," she says in a low voice, her hands limp in her lap but her fury coming over her in a wave. "Because if you won't share, neither will I. Pain meds, you know, I fall asleep at the drop of a hat."

Esposito chuckles, which deflates the tension in the room somewhat, though Castle at her side is still stiff and upright, as if he's in pain.

She slides a glance his way. _Is_ he in pain? PT might be the culprit, but why does it twinge something in her, this look on his face, the careful way he holds himself.

"Apologies, Captain Beckett. I hadn't realized..." Greene slides a despondent look to Esposito as if asking for help, but then he straightens up on his own. "Here's what we have so far. The man who shot you was - by all accounts - Caleb Brown, a defense lawyer who was part of a network of criminals, whose cohorts included members of the CIA based here in New York City. Identifying those cohorts is my job. Your job is done."

"Believe me," she rasps, feeling her voice waver but not knowing why. "I know my job is done."

Castle shoots her a look but she holds his gaze, sending as much confirmation as she can. He turns back to Greene. "And?"

"And I've found a treasure trove of digital information linking them, with the help of Vikram and the NYPD. I can follow their tracks, their fingerprints on a host of dirty operations. Mostly they were skimming money from the CIA, that seems to have been their starting point, but it looks like they were gearing up to sell weapons on the international market. Including enriched uranium."

"God," she chokes, stunned by what they inadvertently stepped into. No wonder Caleb came back from the dead to silence them... but would they have _ever_ known about the weapons dealing? "Our case was closed. How would we have ever...?"

"Precisely that, Captain," Greene says. "That should have been the end of it. Caleb Brown had absolutely no reason to come back for you. For all you knew, so say your reports, Flynn and Mason were the end of things."

"Only it wasn't," Castle says, sounding a little too eager for her liking. "And if it wasn't the end, then-"

"Who else is out there," Greene says with relish.

"No," she groans. "It's supposed to be _over."_

The agent turns wide eyes to her, and she realizes she must sound so desperate. She _feels_ desperate. He pats her hand awkwardly and she wishes she could hit him for it.

"We don't know how many were involved," Greene attempts to placate. "It's possible there are others, but that's not necessarily the case. Captain Esposito here told me that you and your husband had turned Caleb Brown, that he gave you a way to ambush LokSat-"

"It turned out to be a trap," Castle interrupts. And then he scowls fiercely, gives a harsh intake of breath. "Well, but we were 'saved' by Mason, who was actually part of the whole thing." He turns grim eyes to her and she feels her heart clutch. "From the beginning. In LA. I don't... understand. This doesn't make sense, Kate."

Greene is nodding, eager. "Yes, yes, I've read those reports, his role as LokSat. But _Brown_ comes back from the dead solely to shoot you... why? Why doesn't he just leave?"

Castle looks at her and she can tell he doesn't have any idea.

She just wants this to be over. Caleb Brown is dead, Mason is dead - can't it just be _over_?

"Did Caleb tell you anything?" Greene insists. "Did he drop any clues about who else he might have been working with? Why he thought the two of you were loose ends he needed tied up?"

Castle opens his mouth, gives a helpless shrug.

"I don't remember any of that day," Kate says in a low voice. Her throat aches, her whole body throbbing with it. "And - the details of that case? I only know what I wrote in my report. I've got nothing from that week, really."

"Nothing?" Castle rasps, turning to her. She can see him question her statement, but he doesn't seem willing to call her out. "I've got a little more than that, but-" He glances back to Greene. "No, sorry, that day - it's fragments. I remember lying on the floor and - well, my life flashed before my eyes, basically. And looking at Kate, thinking we were both going to die."

Greene frowns, a very serious frown. She knows this isn't what he was hoping for.

"Leave your card," Kate answers, the knot in her throat making it hard to speak. "If anything comes back, we'll call. I never did remember the day I was shot at my old captain's funeral, and Castle kinda has a history of amnesia in these situations."

Her husband shoots her a look and she realizes she's given herself away, told on herself, but he doesn't rat her out.

Greene crosses his arms over his chest, opens his mouth as if he's about to protest, grill them further.

Castle holds up a finger. "Actually, there might be a way. Just came to me. I have this home AI that I bought. I think it called 911? Espo, you said-"

"It was," Espo nods roughly. "Called Dispatch - the operator on duty talked to you."

"Really?" he says roughly. "I don't remember... but that means the AI was functioning. Unlike us, it's a reliable witness."

Kate reaches out and grabs Castle's hand, still gripping her bed railing, and she squeezes his knuckles. "Castle, we're not part of this. This isn't our case. It's not up to us to solve it."

He studies her a moment. "I don't think it's a good idea to _not_ be part of this."

She bites back her frustration, the sick sense of fate coming up to swallow her again. That black hole she has _never_ been able to escape.

"Lucy is her name, the AI's name," Castle starts.

"Linus," she bites out. "I changed it."

"Oh," he stalls out, a long pause. "Well, I don't know then. I - I forgot you changed it." He looks pensive for a moment, like something is coming back. Or maybe it's only now becoming clear to him just how much is hazy, how much the memory plays tricks, stitches scenes together that never were, all so they don't become overwhelmed by all the gaps.

She _does_ remember bits and pieces of that day; but Kate, unlike her husband, knows just how fragmented and jagged-edged those bits of memory are, just how much they can lie, how deep the holes can go.

But what she does remember cleaves her tongue to the roof of her mouth, stops her from speaking, silences her. She remembers the sound of his body hitting the floor, how _awful_ that sound is still; she remembers striding out of their bedroom with her weapon drawn, desperately not wanting it to be true, calling his name and _praying_ to hear his voice, amusement and chagrin, over some blunder.

She remembers shooting Caleb Brown dead center - even as the bullets punched into her. She _remembers_.

But nothing else. That's bad enough.

Castle clears his throat, an unhappy sound in his chest. "I don't know. It might only be a wild goose chase."

"What don't you know, Mr Castle?" Green leans in anxiously. "Let me be the judge of whether it's helpful or not."

Castle rolls his shoulders, winces at the inadvertent movement. "When I first got the AI, I had Lucy coordinated with the home security system we have. I guess - actually I don't know if Caleb Brown tripped the alarm, but I'm guessing not. He showed up at our door once before - damn it, I should have had the locks changed then."

What? "I don't remember that," she says faintly, feeling like an alien in her own life. She knows from her reports (Ryan sneaked them in one night when she was lonely and convinced Castle was dead) that Caleb Brown approached them, she read that part herself, but inside their own home?

Why didn't _she_ insist on changing the locks? Was she that confident in Caleb Brown being a turncoat? She can't fathom it. Paranoia has been her watchword, so much so that she put them both through agony, made him think she didn't believe in them any longer, _left their home._

But Caleb Brown saunters in uninvited, and they ask a black plastic pyramid to be their security system? _Nothing_ makes sense; she's a stranger to herself.

Castle is explaining the home security system while she has a mini breakdown. "I have a camera aimed at the front door, used to be outside in the hall but we-" Castle shoots her a lopsided grin and she suddenly remembers with vivid clarity why they moved the camera indoors.

"Moved it inside," she finishes, heart in her throat. "I remember that."

His lips flatten, a smile he keeps to himself. "Well, anyway, it was aimed at the door but it records audio too, supposed to be added to the dropbox wirelessly every night at midnight. So if Brown did say anything before he shot me, and _if_ Linus kept the same settings I programmed into Lucy, then you should get at least audio of the whole thing."

Greene is glowing of course. " _That_ will be very helpful indeed."

Esposito gives Kate a look that says he must know she's been prevaricating somewhat, that she can't possibly have so much be absolutely blank, but she ignores him. He turns to Castle instead. "You mind setting me up with that recording?"

"It's - well, it would be on the app on my phone. I... don't know where that is," he finishes, looking at her. "I don't have my phone. We've been using the iPads."

Espo shakes his head. "Castle, if you're saying it's an app, all we have to do is download it to your device."

"Oh." Castle nods, his throat bobbing. "Then. Yes. Okay. Let's do that." He moves too fast, grabbing for the iPad between their beds, and he pitches forward.

Kate cries out, but it is Agent Greene with the quick reflexes who catches him, keeps him upright. Between him and Esposito, they maneuver Castle back to the other bed in the room, and all Kate can do is watch, her heart in her throat.

"Just weak, guys," Castle is muttering. "PT takes it out of me, just weak. I'm fine." He sucks in a shallow breath that rattles in the room, and he waves them off. "Kate, I'm fine."

"You're not fine," she gets out, her own pain like dual epicenters sending out quakes from where she jerked forward at his collapse. "You're not fine. You were shot."

She just wants to be _done_ with this damn case.

 **x**

She's so grateful it's only the two of them when he plays the recording.

Greene and Esposito both have a copy; they won't be back about the case, Espo promised her. But Castle, from his bed, plays the app's recording on his iPad.

She cries as silently as she knows how, hearing his voice so clear and distinct - the AI was right there in the kitchen. Makes it sound too real, too present. On the audio track, he muses aloud about the questions he still has and then-

She cries, and Castle, in the bed at her side but still a whole aching length away, breathes noisily through it. She knows he's struggling not to cry as well. The whole thing is there, the whole shooting, though what they say to each other at the end is mercifully too low to be deciphered.

It cuts off when Lucy - Linus - has to switch functions to call dispatch.

Kate presses her face into the hospital mattress, the raised head of the bed giving her enough cover to dry her eyes. Or at least make the attempt.

"Don't cry," he says from the next bed over. But his voice is just as textured as her own would be if she could get words out. "Please, Kate. It's over now."

"It's over," she echoes, sucking in a breath and tilting her head back despite the ache in her ribs, her guts. She just aches. "Just let it be over, Rick."

"It's over now. It's over."

"Stop dragging us back into it," she cries out, squeezing her eyes shut as the words spill, ugly, staining. Words she didn't want to say, tried so hard to keep back.

"I keep - I do, don't I? It's my fault-"

"It's not anyone's fault, it's not - it's who we both are. I know that. But after this..." She swallows hard, his labored breathing filling the room, hers too. "I never wanted to bring it home to you."

"I was the one," he says roughly. "I did that. You _tried_ to keep me out, but I wouldn't."

"I should have kept away-"

"No," he rumbles. "No, you should _not_ have. What I'm saying is that we're both responsible, because we are both adults in this relationship, equal partners."

 _Partners_ , she thinks, clutching at it. "Partners," she says finally. Her panic makes one last push and then begins to recede. She's breathing at least. She can still see. "Partners. Though I'd really love it if we could focus on _life_ instead of - instead of police work, Castle."

"I know, I'm sorry. I didn't get what you were doing, lying to Agent Greene about what you remember-"

"I have - flashes," she admits. "Seems like a whole lot less than the first time around. How sad it is that I have something to compare it to? At least you're here. Although it makes me wonder what I don't know from Montgomery's funeral. What's been blank this whole time. You don't know what you don't know."

He's silent for a moment, and then his voice, when it comes, sounds difficult. "Before the funeral, you gathered us, the four of us, at your apartment to make a vow of silence. A conspiracy. Do you remember that?"

"Yeah," she gets out. "For the most part."

"Do you remember that you weren't talking to me?"

She turns her head, stares at him. "I wasn't?"

His lips twitch and he stares back at her, infinite tenderness on his face. So gentle, her _writer_ , and yet he's struggling to heal from a gunshot wound. She was supposed to protect him, and she failed. Partners, yes, but she didn't have his back. She missed it, and now here they are.

"You weren't happy with me, dragging you out of the hangar to leave - leave him to be killed."

She blinks, realizes she's _never_ slotted this piece into place. "You - you dragged me out of there?"

He winces, scrapes his hand down his face, gives a hissing breath as something must pull. "Ouch. I shouldn't have said anything. You don't remember?"

"No," she gasps, feels like her world is being rearranged again. "No. I... there was just so much grief around it that I never..."

"You couldn't look me in the eyes. I thought because you'd been crying, but-"

It jolts back into place just that fast. "Oh, God, I broke down," she croaks, staring at him, wishing so badly she could at least hold his hand. "I _sobbed_. And you held me back, you had to cover my mouth, I nearly got us _killed_ -"

"Well," he says, a short shake of his head. "I didn't want them to know we were only a hundred yards away. I just - I couldn't let you die, Kate."

"No, of course not."

He huffs, a strange sound, and she realizes he's laughing. "It didn't seem _of course_ to me. At the time."

"No, I guess not," she whispers. "Rick, I'm so sorry for-"

"It's not you. It's not _you_ , Kate. It's _them_. The evil out there that doesn't care who it hurts, who it tramples, who gets sacrificed. Before I met you, the only thing I could do about it was write. But then - you opened up a way to have _purpose_ again, to feel like what I did - who I was - mattered in the grand scheme of things."

"You matter," she says fiercely, feeling her heart breaking open. She aches to touch him. Hold him. "You mattered before you started consulting on cases, Castle. Your books kept me afloat after my mother's murder, gave me hope that answers were out there if only I could think creatively enough."

They lie there for a moment, both a little breathless, absorbing the words they've spoken. Not blame so much as responsibility, and it is such a heavy weight. Knowing how they've brought this down on themselves because they were too stupid to give it up.

He breaks their silence first. "You don't have to be sorry for giving _me_ the chance to help you think creatively. You know? To be the one there when you got justice for your mother. I'm - honored."

"And all the while treating you so poorly when you were nothing but good to me," she murmurs. "Saved me. Always have saved me."

His eyes soak up hers, draw her in with his earnestness. "Don't you think we've more than made up for that?"

"But all of _this_ ," she says, her heart somehow as broken as her body.

"We can make up for this too," he answers. "Have faith in us."

"I do," she says, immediate and automatic. "I have faith in us."

He nods back to her, his mouth quirks. "You better. You'll need it. As soon as you can get out of that bed, physical therapy is gonna hurt like a bitch."

"Damn. It already does."

 **x**

She wakes suddenly. To chaos.

The noise is violent, clamoring in her head, the sound of alarms going off. Steady, jarring, monitor alarms. The insistent wail of _wrong wrong wrong._

And under that, threaded through that, a harsh terrible wheezing. A fish out of water.

" _Castle_ ," she cries out.

All she can see in the darkness are the knuckles of his hand where he grips the bed railing. White. He's sucking down air but it doesn't sound like he's _getting_ any.

Absolute terror burns through her. She thrashes in the bed, pain breaking her torso, bending her double even as she tries to push her legs out of bed. A door slams open, people - help - doctor and nurses rushing inside. A code being called. A crash cart. The light flashes on, brilliant, and it sends her reeling. Kate is canted so far towards Castle that she can't hold herself up any longer, the burn in her body like being torn open.

She collapses back to the bed, her eyes fixed on Castle. His eyes are wide, unseeing, but she can tell he's here, he's entirely too aware, and in such _pain._

He can't breathe.

"Rick," she whispers, tears streaking down her face.

And then her vision of him is cut off as the medical response team swarms his bed, fully enveloping it. All she can hear is that hight-pitched terrible noise as he tries to breathe and can't.

He can't.

 **x**


	9. Over the Welcoming Threshold

**The Last Battle**

* * *

 _Let them go traceless  
_ _through the high grass and into the willow-  
_ _blur, traceless across the lean blue glint  
_ _of the river, to the long dark bodies  
_ _of the conifers, and over the welcoming  
_ _threshold of nightfall._

 _Angela Shaw,_ ** _Children in a Field_ **

* * *

**IX. Over the Welcoming Threshold**

 **x**

As he lays dying, for the second time in a matter of months, what he thinks about isn't the life he's had but the life that shimmers on the edge of the horizon like a mirage. The life he assumed would be his when they made enough steps to reach it, the life that wavers like heat in the distance and might shift out of phase with this universe.

He is not gasping for breath so much as not breathing, and his hand clutches the bedside railing, and his chest burns with incredulity, and he can't fathom not getting to say good-bye to her, not even being allowed to hold her hand at the end.

Don't his dreams come true?

The question repeats like a temper tantrum inside his enflamed chest, an angry beat of heart and blood and the indignation of a man who gets what he wants, always had, always _has._

Has. Has.

Her voice calling his name. _Have faith in us._

He wants the things he can't have, but he _will_ make them have-able.

He is not okay with dying alone in the middle of the night while she cries his name and can't reach him and he grips a bed railing and not his own dreams.

But traceless in the fields they wander, they slide away, and his fingers release and drop, letting go.

 **x**

Pneumothorax. A hole in his lung that leaked air out into the liminal space of his chest. It seems ignoble now, on this side of dying and feeling chagrined, but that's what they tell him happened. A bone chip made a tiny hole, and the rest is history. A nurse has come in to check on him, taps the place on his chest that feels like one big bruise, tells him he is lucky. One needle and his lung inflated and he breathed again, and they rolled him into surgery the second his vitals were stable.

But it took all night for him to stabilize.

He doesn't remember that. But he keeps hearing from various nurses, from his mother when she visits briefly with too-misty eyes and elaborate hand gestures, that Kate talked him through it all night and into the morning, talked and talked to keep him calm, reminded him to open the valve to let the air escape his pleural space when the pressure got to be too much and his lung started to give way. Kate who no one saw sleep for over nine hours yesterday.

However, sometime during his unconsciousness and surgery, Kate has migrated from her own bed to a bowl-like chair with thick cushions, curled in it like a long-limbed and gangly cat.

Asleep. He has no idea how she got here, or what this chair thing is, but he's grateful she can sleep. From all the reports, she kept him sane while the living nightmare went on inside him. He's had a hundred dreams like that - shot on the floor feeling his lungs collapsing - and he knows her voice kept him from entirely falling apart.

But this chair. A mysterious apparition. Right beside his bed.

Kate is so close her hand rests on the mattress right next to his ear as if she's been stroking his hair, and her face is perched right next to his hospital bed. The nurses must have lowered both railings, and the bed itself, and the intimacy of her face near his like this makes his eyes burn with love.

Even as she sleeps. So beautiful, the thin stretch of her skin over bruised eyelids, the very pink lips as if all her vitality and health were concentrated at her partially open mouth.

"Dad?"

He turns his head carefully, finds his daughter standing just inside the doorway. Skinny jeans and a boutique tank top, the cuffs on her jeans rolled to show a pair of gladiator sandals; she looks more like an adult this way, like she's not trying so hard. "Hey," he croaks out.

Alexis holds the door to keep it from slamming shut and then tiptoes inside, her eyes darting to Kate first and then back to him. "How are you feeling?" she whispers, sinking down into a chair on his other side. His non-Kate side. Alexis leans forward and takes his hand, her thumb tucking under the hospital ID bracelet, her smile brittle and tired.

"I'm - getting there," he admits. "What's going on? You okay?" His voice is low and hoarse, difficult with the pain in his lungs.

His daughter withdraws her hand and turns her eyes to Kate, her tone strangely wooden. "Kate was - she had a rough time of it while you were in surgery." Alexis's lips press together and he sees the emotion go across her face. "And when they finally brought you back, I came in and found her trying to get out of bed."

He frowns and turns his head to his wife, restricted by the discomfort at his sternum. No wonder he can see every inked vein in her eyelids. "Kate," he sighs.

"She wanted to be close," Alexis says defensively, some of that stiffness gone from her voice. "So I found this sling chair online. In the therapy furniture. It's filled with individual gel cushions, the self-cooling kind, so that she's supported. So I bought it and had the delivery rushed, set-up right here in the hospital." Her nose wrinkles. "Took some fast talking at the hospital board this morning-"

"What?" He gasps, twisting to look at his daughter. "The hospital board."

"The Castle family has officially donated it to the trauma center." Alexis shrugs as if it's not a big deal. But it _is_. It's a huge deal. She went to the hospital board to get special dispensation for a therapy chair for Kate. His daughter leans in and smooths the top of the blanket at his ribs, patting his arm where the IV tangles in the crook of his elbow. "I didn't want her to do anything stupid."

Castle studies Alexis a moment, not sure if the eye rolling and slight superiority are just her usual affectations or if she means something unkind in it. A backhanded compliment. And the fact that he doesn't know, and has to parse it, makes him feel so weary. "Alexis. I - yes. Okay. Kate and I have done some stupid things in the past, but I believe there's nothing stupid in risking yourself for love. Risking your heart _or_ your physical body, and I'd do it again for her, just as she would do it for me-"

"Oh, Dad, not _that."_ She smiles softly and straightens his already-straight covers. "Believe me, after being kidnapped?, I understand what it feels like to not want you away from me." She shrugs again. "So Kate practically killing herself to get out of bed just to sit five feet closer? Yeah, stupid, but she _does_ love you. Trauma, whatever you want to call it. I know you both are working through stuff, and yet you're stuck in a hospital and in pain and it won't be pretty."

He swallows hard, his eyes stinging, chest tightening in that good way. "Proud of you," he says finally. Nodding. She really has grown up, matured in a way that goes beyond a severe hair cut or wool skirts.

"Dad? I have a small confession."

"Yes?" he hesitates, still off-balance by the compassion for Kate that lives in his daughter's eyes. He's not sure he can _take_ a confession right now, after all this trauma.

"The chair was three thousand dollars."

He laughs, grunts when the sound barks through his chest and jostles things. "You - the chair was three thousand?"

"Yes," she winces. "I'm sorry. I couldn't-"

"Do _not_ be sorry, pumpkin. Never be sorry for opening up your heart-"

"Oh, it wasn't my money. It was yours, Dad, of course." She rolls her eyes and pats his arm again. "On your special card, though. That was the only one I could find. The one you were so giddy to receive?"

"My special... oh." He glances back to Kate, asleep like a cat in the beautiful expensive chair. "The YOLO credit card. Well, Alexis, I think this is precisely what it's for."

Only live once.

As feline as she looks, asleep in that chair, neither Kate nor himself has nine lives to spare. They only have this one.

He's going to make certain it counts.

 **x**

He shouts as he comes awake, launched harshly into the night by a gunshot that echoes in his bones.

"Castle, Castle, Cast-"

"Here," he croaks. "Awake. I'm awake."

"God," she gasps. "You're awake. You're awake." He can hear her breathing just as hard as he is. "Castle. Is this a recent thing - or is it always this bad?"

Nightmares.

"Always," he gets out, and they both hear it. "Think so." He lets out a breath that won't clear his lungs; he tastes stale air when he breathes back in, like nothing is different, none of it will change. "How- about you?"

"I don't know. Mostly forget my dreams."

"Good for you," he grits out. His heart is pounding so hard it vibrates his whole body, makes his shoulder grind with pain. "Glad for that."

"What do you dream?" she whispers.

He growls as he tries to breathe, lifts his hand to his eyes and scrapes down his face, trying to get himself together.

"Talk, Castle. Helps."

"No. It doesn't." She was right, she was so right about everything. How he pushed and prodded and sulked when he didn't get his way after she was shot. Staring morosely at his phone when she didn't call. "I'm an ass."

"No. You're not. Don't talk about the nightmare then, tell me about - about dreams."

"Dreams," he echoes. Wondering. A slim sip of cool air in his lungs.

She hums something in the darkness, shifts. "I've heard you're good with words."

He huffs, laughing a little, whining as his shoulder throbs. She's in the bed, not the chair, and he doesn't know when they moved her. But she's not right at his side and his shoulder hurts, his chest where the bruise is.

"Your shoulder," she murmurs. "I understand. Same for me. Your blood starts pounding because of adrenaline, and that increased blood flow means-"

"Ain't happening, Beckett, even if you _did_ manage to crawl into bed with me."

She laughs, and that sound - oh God - that sound could heal him of a thousand wounds. "Alright, Castle, calm down."

"Working on it."

"I'm serious. If you can't talk about the bad dreams, talk about the good ones."

"You," he sighs.

She whispers his name from far away, a strange sound now that he's encased in the dark and his own fear sweat. He can hear her shifting very slightly in the bed next to his. She sighs, a forlorn sound. "Me? I'm your wet dream."

He laughs, surprised with it. "You are, most assuredly. Even now." Even now, sponge baths and stringy hair and bruises under her eyes and skin like parchment. Because he still has, in his mind's eye, the image of her coming to him in the middle of a thunder storm, taking his face in her hands and sealing their mouths with her intensity, her passion, her want.

And laid over that is the image of waking up to her this afternoon, her body curled in that chair, so very close, his comfort.

"Castle," she whispers in the darkness, bringing him back to here and now. "Did you ever think that maybe _I_ need you to talk to me? You always deflect, and while I - fell in love with your humor, given time-"

" _Time_ ," he gasps, still in it.

"Be _serious_ ," she growls. A hiss as she must have pulled something. "I can't get to you right now. I can't touch you from way over here, can't even hold your hand and make it better for either of us. But talking, words..."

"Well I never expected you to be advocating words," he says. Struggles valiantly for something here. "And no, before you say it, it's not ironic."

"It _is_ ironic. Situational irony is defined as an incongruity between the expectations of what will happen and what actually happens. Incongruities abound tonight. You with nightmares, me with words."

"You're hot when you define literary terms in bed."

She sighs, lapses into silence, the darkness so complete that he feels his old terror rising up, flooding the room once more. Probably flooding her too; he's not the only one in this. She had to talk him through it last night.

"I dream," he chokes out, "I dream about us."

She lets out a shaky breath, and he can practically hear her straining to see him. "Yeah?"

He never expected to confess his terror in the middle of the night with her so far away, never expected her to want to hear it. But worse, he also never expected her to need the comfort of his voice.

And he should really know better by now.

"Rick," she begs.

"I dream about our kids."

"Our... kids," she offers faintly.

"You know that time traveler who-"

"Mm." Her disapproval is more habit than actual; he can hear that much. "And what about it?"

"And. You and me and three kids around the breakfast table, that kind of slow chaos, wrangling everyone into their seats, setting out the food, the juice cups and coffee." He falls silent, worries the edge of the thin blanket at his hips. He's clammy with night terror sweat and he can hear his own breathing, his lungs like a creaky bellow. He really feels bad. He just - he feels bad and he can't find a good position to sleep and he's saying things that are too honest. "I just want to have that, have family with someone who wants to be there, who loves me back."

"God." She makes a noise and he turns to look at her but the black is so black. "Castle, why didn't you say - but of course you do. Of _course_ you do, Rick. And we've talked. About timing and I..."

"I want it to not be a dream," he admits. He feels ashamed, and he doesn't know why. "I don't want to put it off. Timing always sucks. And I'm so damn tired of waiting." His chest deflates, his body sinking into the uncomfortable mattress.

He is just so tired.

 **x**

* * *

 **A/N :**

Dash is here!

My latest ebook is now published on Amazon! Search for 'Laura Bontrager' to find Dash \- or go to my tumblr for the excerpt before you buy.

Thank you so much to everyone who has been encouraging this project from the beginning. It's been a labor of love. I hope you find Dash's new home a place you can love.


	10. The Great Story

**The Last Battle**

* * *

 _"But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story."_

 _- The Last Battle, CS Lewis_

* * *

 **X. The Great Story**

 **x**

Kate lies immobile, bound by pain - and a degree of breathlessness after his confession in the dark - and all she can do is call his name.

 _Rick. Please. Rick?_

The silence that meets her feels prophetic of their future, the emptiness between them, but she struggles for a deeper breath and finds her hand opening on the bed, seeking. _Castle._

The whir of the pain pump delivering a more potent dosage brings her a strange slide of panic, as if she's being called away, and she turns her head, straining to see him in the darkness. The pain medication makes her heavy, makes it hard to stay.

She calls his name again but he must have fallen asleep.

He doesn't stir, his profile unmoved. The loneliness of his last words to her makes Kate _hurt_ , all over, and she wants so badly to erase those broken dreams, to smudge out his dimming visions with her lips, her hands, with her body.

But that's not going to happen.

Her lips don't have the words, and her body won't give him what he wants. Her body can't provide the flush of color to his dreams, and her words won't give him that spark of hope. Not now anyway, not so broken and barely mended, not when she can't even go to the _bathroom_ let alone bear him up under all of this. Her body, her hands, her mouth - they can't give him any of that.

Well, but they _could_.

She's alive - he's alive - they will have a future, and it's together, and despite their broken pieces, they can build their lives into whatever they like.

Kate can give him - would give him anything. She has always dreamed about kids with him; they've had those conversations, worked it out; it was just a matter of timing. But he's right. Their timing is lousy, always has been, and just like they had to just _go_ and get married despite the world conspiring against them, this might be another thing they decide to do, consequences be damned.

They're alike in that, jumping headfirst, flinging themselves at it. Into it, into _life._

 _A family with someone who loves me back._

She swallows fast in the darkness, but the tears come anyway. Streaking back to her ears, cold at her neck.

He didn't say _with you_. She thinks, she hopes, that's just because it's an old dream, and he's using language from decades ago, from the time after Meredith's infidelity and Castle raising Alexis alone. She has seen with her own eyes how tender and raw that wound still is, and she always tries to handle him carefully around those places.

She hopes he doesn't mean her. She hopes that the way she is built and how she leans don't send the wrong message, don't tell him lies about just how _much_ she loves him.

"Castle," she whispers. _Rick._

But all she hears are his snores, the rough breathing that signals his aliveness in the room. Breathing. It's comfort enough to stop her tears, despite the heaviness in her chest from the pain killers that drag at her veins and weigh down her limbs.

Since waking disoriented in the hospital, this is the first time she's been able to see past this night. To see a future again. For them, for herself, for standing on her own two feet and getting out of this hospital and embracing him, embracing life as they once did. She's been there and done that when it comes to rehab, and it was seriously beginning to depress her, the thought of going through all of that pain all over again, and worse - watching him in it as well.

How bleak her thoughts have been when she's actually allowed herself to think. And now how much _hope_ has been infused in her blood like a drug.

She has to get out of this bed.

They have a future to build.

 **x**

Her sleep is riddled with bullets. She wakes soaked in violence but the pain meds smother the images, obscuring them until she can't remember what it is she dreams. She only knows the semi-dark hospital room and the panting of her own breath and the confusion that turns her around, disorients her.

Her eyes catch on Castle in the next bed and hook, unable to look away. He's in shadows, all dark shadows, indistinct, but she knows him. She knows every line of his body, the breadth of his shoulders and the curve of his upper arms where he hides all his strength. The cage of his ribs has always been like a great beast, and she can almost feel him beside her, taller and wider and somehow stronger as well, which surprised her in the beginning and then has become such a touchstone, so integral to who they were.

 _Are._

Who they are.

All that strength and certainty which lies so dormant now, shrouded. But it's still there; it's not just about his muscles or his ability to shoot a gun - or her own. It's about who they are together.

He's a good man. She's not sure she deserves him, but she will fight like hell for him, to keep him _safe-_

Kate swallows hard and closes her eyes.

She didn't keep him safe at all; safe is a lie. Safe is impossible, not just being a detective but being _alive_. A misstep, an accident, a disease - anything could happen, and does happen, and safe is such a ridiculous thing to strive for.

Who _wants_ safe?

She wants happy. Content. She wants fulfilled, she wants purpose. He completes that for her, makes that possible after her job leaves her hollow, dark, broken.

She wants that for him. Not safe. Fulfilled. Not imprisoned in a high tower, but happy, smiling so that his eyes crease and his hands squeeze on her hips in that way he does when his words are tangled. He told her once that killing Derrick Storm was the only thing left to him, that his writing had lost its purpose, but meeting her gave him the Twelfth Precinct and a reason to write again, a reason to be there, to seek justice. And _that_ is what she wants for them.

It may mean blood and death, and she has to be prepared for that. Life is blood and death, in the end, life consists of trauma and abandonment and heartache, and these moments, these episodes of joy are so fleeting that it's pointless to wall them up as if she can protect them at all...

She's so tired. Not just the ache in her chest, those two epicenters of pain that radiate out through her whole body, not just the waves of drug-induced heaviness. But her whole life makes her exhausted. What it's come to. What she can't endure, can't live without.

What is she even thinking, wanting to bring babies into this. She can't do babies. Babies can't do _her_. She'll ruin them. Even with Castle as their daddy-

Her breath catches in the darkness, arresting her every thought.

 _Their daddy._

Her heart flutters despite how corralled by pain it is, flutters and flips like something light. Winged.

She did this last time too, when she was shot. She talked herself out of everything she wants, let her PTSD and her past dictate her future.

No more.

Damn it, she wants out of this bed.

 **x**

The physical therapist cocks her head, glances to the huge white chair that hulks between the beds.

Kate can't hold her breath - that would be bad - but she hopes. Fervently hopes.

One more time.

Just help her-

"Alright," the physical therapist says, sighing. "But you can't walk; you cannot put your feet on the floor and use those core muscles until we're sure the surgery sites have healed."

"I know," Kate says eagerly. "I understand. I'll do whatever you ask."

"Very good," the PT nods. She glances down at her phone. "I'll grab a tech, and we'll carry you over."

"Carry me?" she says, wrinkling her nose. But she smooths out her face. "Right. Carry me. So I won't walk."

"Exactly. But _after_ we do our exercises, Kate. You hear me?"

She sighs. "Yeah, I hear you."

"Alright, I'm going to ease you on your back," the woman says, reaching in to brace Kate's spine and shoulders.

Kate lets out a tight breath, the shift in position making her ribs pop and spark with flashes of pain. Like phosphenes behind her eyelids, the ache flares and burns.

Once she's on her back, the PT wraps her fingers around Kate's right ankle, begins to slowly lift Kate's leg, the other hand bracing. Kate's ab muscles tighten, cramp, and she sucks in another terrible breath, clutches her hands in fists.

"Rate your pain-"

"Yeah, yeah," Kate grunts. "Up there."

"Can you please rate-"

"Seven," she gasps finally, and the PT holds her leg at about forty-five degrees. Holds it there. Agony.

Her muscles are tight, her lower abs so cramped her whole body is shaking, and it sends out tendrils of fire through her torso. Up into her lungs, into the cavity of her ribs so that every breath brings the flames with it, sneaking anguish into her veins.

"How's this, Kate?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah what?"

"Hurts." She swallows, but she's done this before, in exactly this way, starting with the leg lifts in bed and working towards sitting up unassisted, and then standing on her own, followed by those tentative baby steps forward.

Baby steps. She _wants_ those. Aches for those. She will do this.

"Okay, good job, very good, Kate. Now the left." The PT slowly lowers Kate's right leg until it rests once more on the bed, and she recovers it with the blanket. She moves to the other side, flips back the covers, and wraps her fingers around Kate's ankle. "You ready?"

"No." Kate tries to laugh it off, but _hell_. Baby steps. "Yes. Go for it."

"I need you to tell me if you feel any tearing. This is the bad side."

"No kidding."

"Kate, I'm serious. You'll know the difference. Feel the difference."

"Yes," she answers, if it's at all an answer, and she turns her head to catch sight of Castle. He's still asleep, still working off the effects of the anesthesia, the trauma of surgery, but she can see his elevated torso, the slack line of his mouth, the flop of hair falling in his eyes. She wants to run her fingers through his hair and push it off his forehead.

Baby steps.

"Here we go, Kate."

She keeps her eyes on Castle, on his loose-limbed body, the promise of _alive together._ She tries not to tense, tries to keep her muscles relaxed, but she keeps anticipating the hurt.

She knows all too well how this process goes, and the months of physical therapy - of psychological therapy - loom before her like a dark sucking void.

Pain. There will be, _there is_ , so much pain in store for her. A black hole. It will drag her down into the darkness; it will swallow her. It will wreck her life so completely that rebuilding will feel sisyphean.

Impossible.

Her eyelids close as her leg lifts, her lashes fringing the view of her husband, obscuring the hospital room, the monitors, the IV until all that remains is the profile of his face. It's as if he's in bed with her, some early morning before the alarm, the light making everything hazy and golden, so that she could reach out and touch him.

And just as before, the first time she was shot and facing a litany of painful months ahead, the idea of him and what they can have brings both courage and determination, brings her forward into the now.

She can do this. She can make this happen.

 _A family with someone who loves me back._

 **x**

When his eyes open for the morning, she is right there waiting. She can see the confusion that starts first in the crooked slant of his mouth and then the tug of the corner of his eye. His face is half turned to her, and his IV arm twitches. But then the smile breaks out and his lip curls.

"Hey," he answers - her question unasked but most likely in the tilt of her head and the emotions of her eyes. "I'm better now."

She would laugh with relief but it hurts too much. So she settles for pressing her lips together in their old way of communicating. His puns and her wry, held-back amusement. His smarmy comments, his goofy attempts - like courting her - while she merely observes, the strong currents of her emotions in her eyes, for him to read and interpret.

He must see and understand because his fingers lift from the railing where he still clutches, even in sleep, and he catches the edge of her chair.

"Alexis bought it for me," she admits, feels shy about it. And proud. She didn't even do it, whatever it was that made Alexis huff and drag out the iPad from her bag, order a host of things just to offset the ache in Kate's whole torso. "You have a tender-hearted daughter."

Castle's chest rumbles in something like agreement. "I talked to her," he says then, his mouth moving slowly. "When I woke... before."

"Yesterday," she murmurs. "She told me you had. I'm sorry I missed it."

"Didn't miss much," he promises back. "Pretty sure I fell right back asleep."

His eyes are so blue and clear this morning. She still feels the threads of last night's darkness, how they curl between them like wild kudzu, threatening to grow up around their happiness. This simple joy of being alive together.

"Rick," she sighs, the longing so desperate now that she has to blink hard to keep back tears. She doesn't want to call it grief, not this morning, this bright and together morning. She won't _grieve_ something that hasn't been lost, that can even now be reclaimed. "The second I can crawl out of this damn therapy chair, I am going to wear you out."

He lets out a garbled noise, but his mouth is an amused slash, his fingers lifting from the railing again. She can't move to take them, she is that weak from the physical therapy, and from getting _into_ the chair, but his hand fumbles down to her elbow, squeezes.

"You wear me out already," he rumbles, all of him still smiling for her.

She's said it badly, not the right way. She can't figure out how to make it come, how to get it right so that last night's dark-encrusted dreams can be banished for good. "Last night was like - my chest feels torn open again," she starts, "but the rest of me just _wants_ you. I want you, Castle, and-"

"You always do," he says, his voice a rough burr that she calls cocky amusement. Some of that old light is back, the blue laughing eyes, the intent gaze. "You can't help yourself."

"Not _that_ ," she laughs, but how good it feels to laugh about sex, about animal lust and how flexible she is (was) and how she fell for him from the beginning (in his dreams). "Well that too, that's how we get there, of course, but I mean I want to ride until the wheels fall off. I want-"

"Ride me-"

"Oh God, can't you stop thinking about sex for one second?" she bursts out, right as Alexis comes in the door.

His daughter startles, Kate groans and lowers her head, and Castle laughs. Hard enough to wheeze, a hand coming to his chest as he grunts through his laughter, growling at them both for making him laugh.

Even that - the deep creases at his eyes and the broad smile and the breathlessness - bring her such wild and surging joy that she finds a way to lift her hand and capture his own, winding their fingers together. Alexis gives an awkward smile and slides into the room, standing nervously on the other side of Castle's bed. "Um. Hi."

No matter the inopportune time (when is it ever a good time for them?), Kate has to say this. "We're not waiting anymore, Castle. You hear me? Forget the terrible timing. I love you. We're having our kids, our Sunday brunches with juice cups and coffee mugs." She squeezes harder. "Are you listening to me? We-"

"I heard you," he rasps, his eyes so deeply happy that the burr in his voice can't mask his emotion. "I hear you. Juice cups and coffee mugs, Kate."

 **x**


End file.
